A win in payments, not in the back office
Fiserv’s “licensing win”: the Georgia MALPB charter, explained
People searching this phrase want a yes or no and a name. The answer is yes, and the name is the Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank charter. Below is what the charter is, what it changes, and the one thing it does not change for the thousands of banks that run on Fiserv’s core.
Yes. Fiserv won Georgia’s MALPB charter.
The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance approved Fiserv’s Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank charter application on September 27, 2024, issued a permit to begin business on April 11, 2025, and on April 30, 2025 confirmed Fiserv MALPB had processed the first transactions under the charter, the first chartered MALPB in the nation to do so. The charter gives Fiserv direct access to Visa and Mastercard for merchant acquiring without a third-party bank sponsor.
Read the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance announcementThe win, on one page
Strip the headlines down and the event is small, specific, and well documented. Here is the whole thing as a fact sheet.
- What it is
- A Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank (MALPB) charter, a special-purpose Georgia state bank charter that lets a payments company reach the card networks without renting a sponsor bank's identification number.
- Who granted it
- The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance.
- When
- Application approved September 27, 2024. Permit to begin business issued April 11, 2025. First transactions processed under the charter announced April 30, 2025.
- Why it is a “win”
- Fiserv MALPB is the first chartered MALPB in the nation to actually process card transactions. The only prior applicant, Credorax (later Finaro), was approved but the networks declined to work with it.
- What it unlocks
- Direct access to Visa and Mastercard for merchant acquiring, removing the third-party bank sponsor from the settlement chain.
Sources: Georgia Department of Banking and Finance (April 30, 2025) and Banking Dive.
What actually changed: one hop removed from settlement
Before the charter, a processor like Fiserv had to ride a sponsor bank’s identification number to reach Visa and Mastercard. The MALPB charter lets Fiserv hold that relationship directly. That is the entire mechanical change, and it lives in the money-movement path, not in any bank’s operations team.
Merchant card settlement, after the MALPB charter
Notice who is not in that diagram: a sponsor bank. That removal is the win. It is real, it matters to Fiserv’s acquiring economics, and it is also completely invisible to the people doing the daily work inside the banks that license Fiserv’s core software.
The thing the charter does not touch
Two different things share the Fiserv name. One is Fiserv the public company and its merchant-acquiring business, which just got a charter. The other is the Fiserv your bank actually touches every day: a bank-core platform like Premier or DNA, plus the desktop and green-screen applications that sit on top of it.
A charter does nothing for the second one. The morning after the win, a new-account specialist still opens the same core screen, tabs through the same fields, and rekeys a customer’s details from a scanned document into a form that has looked the same for fifteen years. Loan boarding, exception handling, address changes, KYC refreshes: all of it still runs through legacy desktop interfaces that were never built to be driven by an API. The charter is a corporate-strategy story. The back office is a data-entry story, and those two stories never meet.
Why the back-office layer is the hard one to automate
This is the layer most automation tools cannot reach. Browser-based AI agents are built for new web apps with clean APIs; a Fiserv core screen is neither. Traditional robotic process automation works by matching pixels or brittle selectors, so it breaks the moment a core update nudges a field or a service pack relays out a screen, which on banking software happens on someone else’s release schedule, not yours.
How Mediar drives it
Mediar reads what an application exposes through OS-level accessibility APIs, the same interfaces a screen reader uses. That means it can drive Fiserv, Jack Henry, and FIS core screens that have no modern API, the same legacy desktop systems UiPath and Power Automate struggle with. Because there are no pixel matchers or hardcoded selectors, an automation self-heals when a screen moves a label or re-lays a form. Every run leaves an audit log and can enforce validation rules, which is the compliance trail a bank wants. It is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA compliant, and runs on-prem or in the cloud.
The numbers are unglamorous and specific. On bank onboarding, Mediar has taken a process that ran eight weeks down to two by automating the desktop rekeying instead of asking the core vendor for an integration that was never going to ship. That is the kind of win that shows up on an operations team’s calendar, every week, not once in a press release.
A note on honesty: the MALPB charter is used here as a public, documented event that explains why people are searching this phrase. Nothing on this page states or implies that Fiserv uses Mediar. The point is the shape of the problem, which any bank or credit union running a vendor core will recognize.
The charter is Fiserv's win. Your win is the rekeying that disappears.
If your team still hand-keys data into a Fiserv, Jack Henry, or FIS core screen with no API, we can show you how Mediar runs it without breaking when the vendor ships an update.
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Did Fiserv win a banking license?
Yes. Fiserv won a Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank (MALPB) charter from the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance. The application was approved on September 27, 2024, Fiserv received a permit to begin business dated April 11, 2025, and on April 30, 2025 the Department confirmed Fiserv MALPB had processed the first transactions under the charter, making it the first chartered MALPB in the nation to do so.
What is a MALPB charter and why does it matter?
A Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank is a narrow Georgia bank charter created for payment processors. It gives the holder direct access to the card networks (Visa, Mastercard) for merchant acquiring, so the processor no longer has to contract with a third-party bank sponsor to use that bank's identification number. It does not make Fiserv a full deposit-taking bank; the charter is limited to authorizing, clearing, and settling card transactions for merchants.
Is Fiserv now a bank?
Only in a limited sense. The MALPB charter is purpose-built for merchant acquiring, not for taking consumer deposits or making loans. Fiserv (Nasdaq: FISV) remains a payments and financial-technology company; the charter removes a middleman from one part of the card-settlement flow rather than turning Fiserv into a retail bank.
Was Fiserv the first to get this charter?
Fiserv was not the first to apply, but it is the first to make it operational. Georgia first offered the MALPB charter in 2012. The only earlier applicant, Credorax (renamed Finaro and later acquired by Shift4), was approved by the state, but the card networks would not work with it. Fiserv is the first chartered MALPB to process card-based transactions.
Does this charter change anything for a community bank that runs Fiserv core?
No. The charter is about Fiserv's own merchant-acquiring business reaching the networks directly. If you are a community or regional bank running a Fiserv bank-core platform such as Premier or DNA, your tellers, back office, and onboarding teams still log into the same desktop and green-screen systems and key in the same data the day after the charter as the day before. The operational layer is untouched.
What does Mediar have to do with Fiserv?
Fiserv's bank-core platforms are exactly the kind of legacy Windows desktop and terminal systems Mediar automates. Mediar reads what an application exposes through OS-level accessibility APIs, the same interfaces a screen reader uses, so it drives Fiserv, Jack Henry, and FIS core screens that have no modern API. We reference the charter only because it is the public event behind this question. Nothing here states that Fiserv uses Mediar.
Where can I read the original announcement?
The Georgia Department of Banking and Finance press release dated April 30, 2025 is the authoritative source and is linked in the direct-answer box near the top of this page. Banking Dive and Payments Dive also covered the September 2024 charter approval.
More on banking automation and reading the filing instead of the rumor.
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