In addition to setting up a bank as a Master or Agent Institution, the SmartVista Processing solution requires that it should be set up as a Primary or Associated Member for each of the supported card networks. If the bank in question is an Associated Member of a particular Card Scheme, another Institution must be selected from those maintained on the same SmartVista solution as a Primary Member to serve this Associated Member as a Member Service Provider (MSP) / Third Party Processor (TPP).

So, for instance, if the SmartVista solution is installed in an independent processing centre to provide MSP/TPP support to two banks and each of these banks is a primary Visa member, each of them will be set up as a separate Institution, which will also be a Primary Member for Visa. In this case, all the processing and interchanges for these banks will happen in an absolutely independent way, just as if there were two separate SmartVista solutions serving them.

If, on the contrary, one of these banks is an associated Visa member, it will be set up as a separate Institution but its Primary Member assignment will point to the other bank that has a status of a primary member. In this situation, the associated member's transactions will be included in the primary member's Card Network Interface files but the Banking System interface may still be separate.

Of course, these are just two of the many examples possible.