Credit cards are issued and processed through different people.  It often helps a credit card user or applicants to know which people are operating the various parts of a credit card.

The card issuer is the bank, financial institution or store that gives out the credit card.  This may simply be a brand that has a credit card as part of their brand offering, as many Football teams do.  They may also be a store or an airline.  In the cases where they are not the operator then they will simply take a share of the money for the use of their brand.  In return they will allow their customer base to be sold to and they will also often offer discounts or upgrades on their brands either as signing up bonuses for their credit cards or as rewards for using the credit cards to buy their goods.  There may also be accelerated rewards, such as reward points or cash back, which can be used as a reward for shopping with the brand.

A variant of the card issuer is the affinity schemes, which often back a charity or cause.  These affinity schemes have a card issuer and operator that is a bank, but the affinity user simply gets a proportion of the profit on the card – usually a proportion of the amount that is paid by the shop that processes the payments.

The operator is the company who actually manage the account.  In the case of many banks this will be the same as the issuer.  However there are some operators who specialise in operating credit cards for other, external, issuers.  For example GE Finance operates many store cards while MBNA operates many of the affinity cards.  These are the companies that approve the card holder, keep track of what is spent and send the statements (even though much of the communication may have the brand of the issuer).

As banks and credit unions are already skilled at both managing client accounts and advancing credit they tend to both issue and operate their own credit cards.  Most credit cards are still operated by financial institutions with which the card holder has another relationship with, such as a current account.

The processor is the company, such as VISA or MasterCard that processes the transactions.  They are independent of the issuers and operators and their cards are accepted worldwide.