Not exactly. Card systems is a payment clearinghouse. Merchants submit transactions to a clearinghouse, who route things to the correct card company, who route it to the issuing bank. A few "very large" retailers (e.g. sears, walmart) may deal directly with the CC companies, but it is unlikely. Some card issuers _also_ run a payment clearinghouse, and thus short-cut the processing of their cards, when processed through their clearinghouse.
The merchants that use Card Systems, know who they use to processes card charges.
Customers of those merchants, however, have no way of telling, nor of finding out, who the merchant uses to 'clear' the CC transactions.
Folks like Card Systems serve a similar purpose to "aggregators" and/or "freight forwarders" in the shipping business. They provide access to the high-volume channels, for those who don't have the justification for 'direct' access to those channels.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And other than that one sort of skimpy and guarded press release they gave out (and we printed here on Saturday), they have had nothing more to say about it. PAT]