How Acquirers Read a Merchant Application: The Variables Behind an Approval, a Reserve or a Decline
An acquirer reads a merchant application by asking one question underneath all the others: if this business stopped operating tomorrow, how much money could the bank be left owing to cardholders, and how likely is that? Every variable on the application, from average...
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 chip handing over an account number and...
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 worst cases, end your account. The code shapes...
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 fix is rarely one big move. It is a set of...
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 easy to see in advance: data you cannot...
CEO - Nationwide Payment Systems
