Merchant Account Providers - Helping Businesses Stay Ahead in the Race

For entrepreneurs big and small and ventures like legal firms, retail shops or real estate companies, running a business comes with many responsibilities. And one among the several challenges those businesses face is to be able to collect and process payments made by customers through credit and debit cards. Getting started with a secure merchant account and making the business / products / services accessible to a wider audience is the first major hurdle that any new business faces. This responsibility is therefore outsourced to merchant account providers who create merchant accounts on behalf of the business and process payments made towards the business.

Who is a Merchant Account Provider?

The entire process of credit card payments and their processing is today being handled by companies who are widely known as Independent Sales Organizations (ISO). These ISOs are responsible for selling merchant bank accounts to merchants or business owners, processing the payments through a dedicated gateway and submitting the same to a Visa or MasterCard network. They are also responsible for providing technical support through the entire process and they ultimately set the price for the services rendered. ISOs are also known as merchant account providers because of the kind of facilities they directly provide to merchants.

Services Provided by Merchant Account Collection Agencies

As described above, the entire gamut of payment collection and their processing is done by merchant account providers on behalf of the merchant. However, this overtly simplistic service includes various other crucial facilities that a collection agency or ISO needs to provide in order to offer a seamless service in credit card processing. These include:


• POS Equipment Rentals - No matter what kind of business one handles, merchant account providers should be able to provide credit card processing equipment anywhere and everywhere. While at the physical point of sale location, companies need to provide electronic card readers and for portable or mobile businesses that need to make collections from the location of the customer, mobile (GPRS) or internet services need to be put into place.

• Anti-Fraud Measures - Only secure payment gateways that offer several layers of anti-fraud assistance both to the merchant and the merchant’s customer will increase customer loyalty.

• Offshore Assistance - Since a number of businesses function across time zones, it’s important to provide a secure payment gateway that is available to customers across geographies.

• Technical Support - The success of a good credit card processing platform depends on its technical systems and the quality of software used. For example, QuickBooks, which provides online POS assistance to merchants, helps businesses sync their sales and inventory in a timely manner. This also helps merchants, associated with larger businesses which are spread across geographies, instantly know which product or service has been sold and to whom, as well as track the status of the credit card payment.

What’s more, these kinds of software are also able to minimize data errors or repeat entries and help merchants authorize secure transactions.

To initiate error free credit card transactions and avoid duplicate or slow credit card processing, assistance from merchant account providers will help businesses grow faster and reach a wider base of customers.