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This article appears in the July 2, 2009, edition of ISO&Agent Weekly.
Industry professionals have guessed 300, 5,000 and even 10,000 ISOs when asked how many registered ISOs exist in the United States.
Visa Inc. put the question to rest in recent weeks when it made its lists of registered ISOs publicly available on its Web site. The total, according to Visa, is on the lower end of many observers' estimates.
The 44-page document contains more than 1,900 entries, however some entries are duplicates because some companies registered to accept Visa credit and registered again to accept Interlink, Visa's PIN-based point-of-sale debit brand. The list also contains the names of organizations that offer Visa prepaid products.
Visa's list is available at www.visa.com/isolisting. Details of each entry are sparse, with only a few containing company Web sites.
"I've been asking for this since as far back as 1995," says Joyce Cook, president and CEO of International CyberTrans, a Brentwood, Tenn.-based ISO.
Cook at that time was president of the Electronic Transaction Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing ISOs and acquirers.
MasterCard Worldwide says it does not intend to release its list of registered ISOs because the sponsoring banks actually hold the information and ISOs may not want MasterCard to disclose it.
List Release A 'Good Thing'
Cook welcomes Visa's release of the list. "It's a good thing because there are a lot of people who are not registered and shouldn't be allowed to represent the brands," she tells ISO&Agent Weekly.
That appears to be part of the reason why Visa released the list.
"To manage risk in the payment system, Visa requires financial institutions to register their third-party agents with Visa," Eduardo Perez, Visa head of payment system risk, said in a statement to ISO&Agent Weekly.
"Registration ensures third parties' agents are properly identified and that financial institutions are performing the necessary due diligence, including periodic financial audits and background checks," said Perez.
Cook envisions using the list to her ISO's advantage, especially to check out competitors vying for the same merchant account.
"If we're competing against a nonregistered ISO or prospecting a merchant with a nonregistered ISO, that would be part of our presentation and proposal," she says.
Merchant Benefit
The list also could help merchants, suggests Jamie Savant, partner at The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments consultancy.
Merchants could review the list to ensure prospective ISOs are indeed registered with Visa, Savant says. "This is very healthful," he says.
The release of Visa's ISO list is a leap from the early days of the industry in the mid-1980s when transaction fees and equipment pricing were not disclosed, he says. Merchants began to "get burned" when they later faced higher-than-expected fees, Savant says.
Publication of this list will help push those memories even further away, he says. "As an industry, we need to step up and let the merchant know who they're doing business with," Savant says.
Linda Perry, the former Visa head of acquirer relations and now an independent consultant, sees disclosure of the list as a positive.
"If it encourages ISOs to register and get their names on it, it's a good thing," Perry tells ISO&Agent Weekly.
