• Select

  • Select

Glossary


This page serves as a brief glossary of commonly used terms throughout Fusion documentation. They are covered in much more detail in Resource Types.

Term Description
Account An Account corresponds to one single liability or asset ledger and represents one integral value in a specified currency (balance).
Account Holder Account holder is a real/legal customer to Fusion. Drawing from the real world analogy, account holder could be an actual person who holds an account at a bank or could be a legal entity like a corporate, merchant, so on.
Account holders can also be headless (anonymous), in which case we may not be able to ascertain the identity of the customer using identifiable documents.
Artifact Artifacts are entities of the customer’s interest that a bank can produce and maintain. For the purpose of this document we call fundamental entities such as Account, Payment, Resource, Transaction and Wallet as Artifacts.
Bundle Bundle is a concept that enables financial institutes to create and combine several products that could be sold together. Examples include an ICICI Salary account which gives you a Savings account bundled with a VISA Coral Debit card. It is also a manifestation of the application form and workflow. A Product can only be availed by an end-customer through the construct of a Bundle.
IFI Issuing Financial Institutes (IFIs) are institutions like banks that have the license and the authority to store accounts, create wallets, process payments, and many more. For example, State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, RBL Bank, IDFC Bank, Sodexo, and so on.
Form Factor A Form Factor is a manifestation of a payment instrument.
Individuals Technically referred to as Real Account Holders, these customers can be on-boarded as either min-KYC customers or full-KYC customers, as directed by the IFI.
KYC Know Your Customer (KYC) is a process by which financial institute obtains, ascertains and validates information about the identity of a customer.
Product Packaging of an Artifact for a specific customer. It can also be thought of as a set of business rules that define the associated Artifact. These may include, among other things, transaction policies, interest/charges, risk/compliance controls, associated accounting practices.
Program A specification for minor variants of Products within a family to enable marketing and sales activities like Promotions, Discounts, Customizations, and so on.
Provider A Provider is a virtual construct created to ease the handling and governance of the lifecycle of the kind of products it produces.
Payment Channel Payment channels are the rails on which the money moves and include various payment networks and settlement schemes like Visa, Mastercard, IMPS, NEFT.
Payment Instrument Each authenticatable vector associated with the Resource is called a Payment Instrument. Some of these Payment Instruments may have real-world physical form factors, whereas others may have digital-only representations. It can be used for authentication in any financial or non-financial transactions. Fusion will support multiple forms of payment instruments including payment cards, mobile numbers, email addresses, usernames and passwords, digital tokens, and so on.
Payment Products Payment products are business constructs created to allow IFIs to manage different kinds of payment Artifacts, along with the lifecyle and associate policies.
Policies PPolicies are associated configurations added as part of a product definition to allow permissible behaviors in every financial and non-financial transactions.Policies could also be used to define and alter the basic business rules of the products, the risk management for the product and to monitor the utilization of products.
Resource A Resource is an entity representing a digitally authenticatable vector of an Account Holder. It can be used for authentication in any financial or non-financial transactions.The purpose of a resource is to enable grouping of various payment instruments that may logically belong to a customer and administer various policies on that collection and on the payments that may originate using the payment instruments associated with it.
A Resource, as previously mentioned, is associated with one or more payment instruments. In a majority of use-cases, resources are bundled with an Account Holder. However, it is completely possible for a resource to exist independently. Examples include Metro Rail Cards, where payment transactions may be required with no notion of an identifiable account holder. In such cases, payment instrument is a bearer instrument.
Sandbox Sandbox framework is a generic access control framework used to control access to a Virtual Bank Operator (VBO).
Transaction Transaction is an instruction to the financial institute to transfer funds from one account to another account at the institute or an external institute using any of the inter-bank settlement systems carried out between payer and payee. The payee may have an account on Zeta system or any other bank.
Kindly note that a transaction may not necessarily have a notion of a payer and a payee. It could purely be a transfer of funds between accounts or withdrawal of funds by the account holder at the bank teller counter.Successful payments translate to one or more transactions. A payment performed through a Resource associated with an Account Holder is deemed as a Transaction instruction issued by the Account Holder.
Fintech Fintech is an entity that utilises the banking license of the governing IFI to provide products and solutions that can benefit their specific use case. A good example of a fintech would be Zeta who provides Fusion platform on behalf of let’s say RBL Bank.