The network isn’t the only rail anymore
Your authorisation data shows you everything routed through you and nothing routed around you. Across 6,917 analysed companies that embed financial products — the buyers, not the vendors selling to them — 794 disclose an account-to-account rail and 589 name a card network at all — 1.3× more of the former. Where a card still appears, it increasingly sits downstream of settlement that somebody else owns.
Where the money moves
Rails named in companies’ own sourced stack text, ranked by how many disclose them. Blue rails settle without a card network. Purple rails still route through one — see where they rank.
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. 58 companies disclose all three links — network, issuer-processor and sponsor bank. Those are the relationships that decide which network a program launches on, and they sit upstream of the network itself.
Every figure counts companies that disclose something in public sources — documentation, subprocessor lists, press releases, filings — across 6,917analysed 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.