Payments covers payment service providers, gateways, card acquiring, bank transfers and wallets, subscription billing and the tools merchants use to accept money online and in shops. Organisations use them to collect payments, pay suppliers and staff, handle refunds and reconcile transactions with their accounting.
Payments are tied to licensing and to infrastructure that crosses borders. A provider may hold a licence as a payment institution in one member state while relying on card schemes, processors and cloud platforms elsewhere, and wallets add another intermediary. For you the practical dependencies are the settlement account, the tokens that represent stored cards and the fraud tools that see customer behaviour. Stored card tokens usually cannot move to another provider without a negotiated migration, which makes switching slow.
When choosing a European option, check the licence and the supervisor, support for the payment methods your customers actually use, the process for exporting tokens, how the provider reports on ICT risk and subcontractors, and whether you can use more than one provider for resilience. Financial entities should also review contracts against the DORA provisions on ICT third-party arrangements, including the register of information and rules on subcontracting.