payment industry news
Follow the blog for all of your payment industry news. We talk about FinTech, Credit Card Processing, High-Risk Merchants, and much more. Allen Kopleman has been providing merchant accounts for small business for over 20 years. Nationwide Payment Systems provides merchant account services to local businesses in South Florida.
How Residual Splits Are Calculated for Referral Partners and ISOs, and Why the Number You Were Quoted May Not Be the Number You Are Paid
A residual split is calculated by taking a share of a base amount, and the base is the part that most often differs from what you were told. Two programs can advertise the same headline share and pay very different amounts,...
PayFac Sub-Merchant Monitoring: Where the Liability Sits and What Controls a Payment Facilitator Needs
When a sub-merchant under a payment facilitator (PayFac) causes a loss, the bill does not stay with the sub-merchant. Under Visa and Mastercard rules, the acquiring bank answers for what its payment facilitators and their...
Cash Discount Program or Absorbing Processing Fees: How to Compare the Real Costs for Your Business
Neither a cash discount program nor absorbing card fees is automatically cheaper, and the answer can only come from your own numbers, because it depends on how your customers pay. For example, a business that processes...
Payment Links and Invoicing: How a Payment Link Works, How It Settles and the Risks to Watch
A payment link is a secure web address you send to a customer by email, text or QR code so they can pay you on a hosted payment page, with a card or by bank transfer, without calling you with a card number. When the...
How Buy Now, Pay Later Works for a Merchant: How It Settles, How It Differs From a Card Payment and What Providers Look At
When a customer pays you with buy now, pay later (BNPL), a third-party provider approves the customer, pays you for the sale and then collects from the customer over time. You do not wait for the customer's installments....
What Happens Inside an ACH Batch: Where the Timing and the Risk Sit
An ACH payment does not travel alone. It is collected with other payments, sent in a group at set times, settled between banks on a schedule and then left open to being sent back for a short or long window depending on who...
The Durbin Amendment: What It Changed for Small Merchants and What It Left Untouched
The Durbin Amendment is a 2010 federal law that changed three things for small merchants: it limited what the largest banks can charge on debit card interchange, it required debit cards to work on at least two unaffiliated...
First-Party Fraud: Why Your Chargeback Data Can Hide Who Is Really Behind a Dispute
First-party fraud is a dispute filed by the cardholder, or by someone using the cardholder's own account, over a purchase that was real. In your chargeback data it looks almost identical to a stolen-card case, because the...
How Chargeback Reason Codes Work: What the Code Tells You, What It Hides, and How to Read Your Own Dispute Data
A chargeback reason code is a short label, usually a number such as 10.4 or 4837, that the customer's bank attaches to a dispute to say what kind of claim it is. The code tells you which evidence the bank expects to see,...
Interchange Qualification and Downgrades: Why the Same Card Costs Different Amounts and What Triggers a Downgrade
The same card costs different amounts because every card payment is sorted into an interchange category, and the lowest-cost category has requirements your sale must meet. When a sale misses a requirement, it is...
B2B Merchant Accounts: What Changes When Your Customers Are Businesses
A B2B merchant account is a merchant account used by a company that sells to other companies, and it behaves differently from one built for a shop. The tickets are bigger, the sales are invoiced rather than rung up, buyers...
How Retail and POS Businesses Can Use AI and Simple Controls to Reduce Payment Fraud and Chargebacks
Artificial intelligence can help a store or restaurant catch bad payments before they are approved, but it is one layer in a stack, not a replacement for the basics. NPS describes AI fraud prevention as software that...