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When your cardholders spend, the card networks — not Lead’s payment rails — move the money. Network settlement is the daily process by which each network requests the funds owed for activity on your program’s BINs, and Lead, as your BIN sponsor, pays the network and books the flows. Your side of the process is data: making sure the daily network settlement reports reach Lead so Lead knows how much to move, and reporting the underlying card transactions so Lead can reconcile and perform oversight.

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Who Does What

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How a Day Settles

  1. Cardholders transact at your issuer processor on the networks.
  2. The network’s daily settlement report — covering transactions, refunds, interchange, fees, and disputes — reaches Lead, typically delivered by your issuer processor via SFTP each morning. If the processor provides it in a network-generated format (e.g., T461 or T140 for Mastercard), it can be submitted as-is; otherwise you reformat it into a supported format. Required formats and per-network specifics: Network Settlement Reports.
  3. Lead funds the network. For debit/prepaid BINs, net transaction activity is funded from the source of funds, typically your FBO — it’s your customers’ money moving. For credit BINs, activity is funded from Lead-owned funds — these are loans, which is why settled credit spend creates receivables on Lead’s books that flow into your daily sale (Receivables & the Daily Sale). Full flows per BIN type, the report data points that drive them, timing, and weekend behavior: Network Settlement Funding Obligations.
  4. You report, and Lead reconciles. You submit posted card transactions with their network settlement dates through the daily Transactions reporting, and Lead reconciles them against the network reports: Network Settlement Reconciliation.
Network settlement funding runs independently of every other workflow — Lead processes settlement files and pays the networks on time regardless of what other data has arrived, and there is no T-1 dependency: if a day’s files arrive late, Lead still processes the entries when they appear.

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BIN Sponsorship at Lead

If Lead is the BIN sponsor for your program, Lead performs network settlement for every network your BINs are active on. Once networks are chosen, you’ll work with Lead, your issuer processor, and the network(s) to launch the BIN, which can take three or more months.
Push to Card. If Lead is processing OCT or AFT transactions on Lead’s acquiring BINs, Funding Obligations and Reconciliation still apply. Lead can support specific acquiring processors.

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In This Section

Network Settlement Funding Obligations — how Lead funds each network per BIN type, the report data points, timing, and weekend behavior · Network Settlement Reconciliation — how the transactions you report are matched against the network’s numbers · Network Settlement Reports — the required file formats per network.