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 Tap to Pay Works at the Hardware Level, and What Data Leaves the Terminal
When a customer taps a card or phone, the payment terminal's antenna creates a short-range radio field, the chip in the card or phone wakes up inside that field, and the two exchange a short conversation that ends with the...
How MCC Codes Are Assigned, and Why the Wrong One Can Kill a Merchant Account
Your merchant category code, or MCC, is assigned by the acquiring bank or processor that boards your account, based on what it understands your main business to be, and the wrong code can quietly cost you money or, in the...
Net-30 and Net-60 Terms: How They Squeeze Cash Flow When You Pay Suppliers Sooner
When you give customers net-30 or net-60 terms but have to pay your own suppliers sooner, you are lending your customers money out of your own working capital, and the gap between the two dates is the size of that loan. The...
How to Choose a POS System When You Don’t Know How Your Business Will Grow
If you do not know yet how your business will grow, choose the point-of-sale system you can leave most easily, not the one with the longest feature list. Growth paths are hard to predict, but the costs of a wrong guess are...
What an Acquirer Actually Reads When You Apply to Become a PayFac
When you apply to become a payment facilitator, the acquiring bank is not grading your software. It is deciding whether it can accept responsibility for you and for every business you will ever sign, because under...
How to Set Up Recurring Donation Billing That Survives Expired Cards
Recurring donation billing survives expired cards when four things work together: the card is stored as a token with the donor's permission, your processor keeps it current through the card networks' updater services,...
How Do I Report Payment Processing Fees on My Form 990?
Report every gift at its full amount on Form 990, then report the card processing fees separately as an expense, because the IRS tells nonprofits not to net related items and says an organization that reports contributions...
Do Nonprofits Pay the Same Card Processing Rates as For-Profit Businesses?
Not always, but far more nonprofits pay the same as a coffee shop than ever need to. Visa and Mastercard both keep charity categories in their published fee schedules, which means a properly set up donation can carry a...
Buy Now, Pay Later Financing Options for B2B Merchants: What Fits Your Buyers
A B2B merchant has five realistic ways to let a business buyer pay later: net terms you carry yourself, a third-party pay-later or trade-credit provider that pays you up front, the buyer's own business or purchasing card,...
At What Chargeback Ratio Do Card Networks Start Threatening a Merchant Account?
Visa's published line for a single merchant in the United States is a VAMP ratio of 1.5 percent, counted on card-not-present fraud reports and disputes, and it only applies once a merchant has at least 1,500 of them in a...
How Buy Now, Pay Later Actually Changes Your Average Order Value
Offering buy now, pay later usually raises the average order value of the customers who choose it, but that is not the same as raising the average order value of your business, and the gap between those two numbers is where...
CBD Chargebacks: Why the Dispute Pattern Is Different and What Controls Actually Work
CBD chargebacks are different from ordinary e-commerce chargebacks because they cluster around a few predictable triggers: recurring orders customers forget they signed up for, billing descriptors nobody recognizes,...