settlement
Settlement is the stage at which money actually moves: after a payment is authorised and captured, the card scheme settles funds from the cardholder's bank to the acquirer, which then settles with the business, net of fees, on an agreed schedule. Authorisation reserves the money; settlement transfers it.
A card payment happens in three steps that are easy to confuse. Authorisation checks the card and holds the amount. Capture tells the acquirer to collect it. Settlement is when the funds move: the scheme nets up the day's transactions between issuers and acquirers, and the acquirer credits the business, usually the next working day or on a fixed cycle, less its charges.
For a software platform the detail that matters is what settles to whom. In a regulated-partner model each payment is divided at settlement between the customer's share and the platform's fee, so the platform's fee is settled to it and the customer's share to the customer without either passing through the other. The regulated acquiring partner holds the funds between capture and payout; Synapto does not.
For a business, settlement timing is cash flow. One working day and three working days are both common, and weekends and bank holidays stretch both. Reconciliation is the other side of it: a settlement batch arrives as one amount covering many payments, and matching it back to individual invoices is the job a good platform does for its customers so the customer never has to.