An alternative payment method, or APM, is any way of paying other than the international card schemes: digital wallets, bank to bank transfers, open banking payments, buy now pay later, cash vouchers, carrier billing and cryptocurrency all qualify. APM is the umbrella term; the country specific subset is the local payment method.
Why it matters
For high risk merchants APMs are not a checkout nicety, they are risk diversification. Card acceptance can be repriced, reserved or terminated by a single acquirer decision, while a portfolio of APMs spreads that dependency across rails with different rules, and many APMs carry no chargeback mechanism at all. The trade offs are real, settlement times, coverage gaps and their own compliance regimes, but a merchant whose revenue survives the loss of a card MID negotiates with acquirers from a very different position.