The network is no longer the rail
Your authorisation data shows you everything routed through you and nothing routed around you. Across 4,682 analysed companies that embed financial products — the buyers, not the vendors selling to them — 551 disclose an account-to-account rail and 228 name a card network at all — 2.4× more of the former. Where a card still appears, it is increasingly the spend-out veneer over settlement somebody else owns.
Where the money actually moves
Rails named in companies’ own sourced stack text, ranked by how many disclose them. Blue rails settle without a card network. Purple ones still need you — note how far down the list they start.
Your distribution, as disclosed
Read each line right to left: the network is the last link, and everything between it and the cardholder belongs to someone else. 36 companies disclose all three links — network, issuer-processor and sponsor bank. Those are the relationships that decide which network a program launches on, and none of them are yours.
Every figure counts companies that disclose something in public sources — documentation, subprocessor lists, press releases, filings — across 4,682analysed companies that embed financial products into their own product — buyers of embedded finance, not the providers selling it. None of it is transaction volume, revenue, or market share, and it should not be read as a proxy for them: a single disclosed A2A integration and a billion-transaction card program count once each. What disclosure frequency does measure is which rails builders consider worth naming when they describe how their product moves money — which is the leading indicator, not the trailing one. Rail names come from companies’ sourced stack text, so a rail used but never named is absent. Card-push rails (Visa Direct, Mastercard Send) are counted as card-dependent, not A2A, which makes the gap this page describes narrower than a looser definition would.