Canonical Payment Data Models for Merchant Acquiring: Merchants, Terminals, Transactions, Fees, and Chargebacks

Abstract

This paper presents a canonical payment data model that unifies merchant master records, terminal lifecycle management, transactional events (authorization, presentment/clearing, settlement), fee and interchange rating, and end-to-end chargeback workflows for merchant acquirers. Its design follows event sourcing with conformed dimensions and effective-dated reference data using disciplined Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) patterns Type 0 to represent stable identities, Type 1 to represent clerical corrections, and Type 2 to represent historized and time-varying attributes to ensure that all acquirers and schemes maintain point-in-time truth and reconciliation breaks are eliminated. Specify core entities and relationships, give ERDs representing terminal state transitions, transaction hops and dispute episodes, and also contain sample mappings between legacy flat files and ISO 8583/ISO 20022 messages into a core and analytic star schema. Auth presentment settlement chargeback is linked to a lineage blueprint that supports deterministic surrogate keys and rule versioning, achieving every financial result, therefore, explainable and reproducible. Auditable pricing and retrospective re-rating the pricing is supported using effective-dated and interchange tables which have hierarchical applicability (region, scheme, product, MCC, channel, risk). Some of the areas of implementation guidance include a layered lakehouse/warehouse (bronze/silver/gold), streamline authorizations, micro-batch settlement alignment, tokenization with a PCI scope, and data quality contracts. The concepts of faster onboarding by standardized contracts and devices provisioning, improved data quality by conformance gates and SCD stewardship and significantly reduced exceptions by uniform lifecycle semantics and disciplined typology of dispute are measured.