ISOs

Interchange rates on payments in the fuel and energy sectors can be so complicated that energy marketers can lose thousands of dollars a year because of mistakes they make in coding their authorized credit card transactions.

For several years, independent sales organizations have been warned by colleagues in the merchant acquiring business that they had to keep up with payments technology to remain relevant in the payments ecosystem. And judgment day is fast approaching.

As if they needed another reminder that their business models might not have a place in the modern payments landscape, independent sales organizations are left wondering what role — if any — they will have in launching the Apple Card.

NCR has turned to the acquisition market to shore up its defenses against fintech challengers, a further signal that longtime retail industry staples such as payment hardware and ISOs are going by the wayside as dedicated business models.

Worldnet is adding Google Pay to its cloud-hosted platform to address the pressure on payment service providers and independent sales organizations to securely embrace multiple payment channels and computing devices.

Terminal provider paycosmos has launched its "ISO in a Box" payment platform, saying the software provides everything an independent sales organization needs to support agents and acquire merchant contracts.

International e-commerce is booming these days and so too are the opportunities—and challenges—for payments players.

One way for acquirers and independent sales organizations to stand out in a highly competitive field is to devote a part of their business to worthy causes.

In a post-Equifax world, independent sales organizations, acquirers and payment processors are under much more scrutiny over merchant account applications and underwriting.

The acquirer OLB Group is positioning itself as a data steward for a future in which merchants will have predictive data to inform decisions on financing.

In India, tens of millions of merchants still operate largely in cash with a mostly unbanked rural population. Technology could solve their problems, but the bigger differentiator may be in how payment services are sold.

Payments processor Shift4 Payments has acquired CurvePay, an independent sales organization focused on the taxi industry, the latest in a string of recent acquisitions.

When asked to discuss the corporate gender gap, Linda Perry paused, just long enough to be noticeable in 30-minute phone conversation. She took that moment to ponder how pervasive predatory behavior remains inside the workplace — and how to address it as both an issue of culture and as a business challenge.

Even the efficiencies of an upgrade may not be enough for the human touch that some higher-risk accounts require, leaving a "painful" process for merchants and acquirers.

Giving merchants direct access to third-party software isn’t new—First Data’s Clover unit introduced the concept three years ago—but Vantiv is giving its approach a custom-development spin with an app marketplace.

As ISOs evaluate payment partners, it’s important that to dig into their existing tools and also gain an understanding of what the company’s continued investment is going to be for the future, writes O.B. Rawls IV, CEO and president of iPayment.

Using good, old-fashioned customer service and consultation to cut down on merchant attrition has been part of the acquiring playbook for years. But that playbook is long overdue for an update.

Same-day Automated Clearing House transactions exist, in part, as a first step in the faster payments initiatives taking place in the U.S. But are they lucrative enough for acquirers to add to their portfolio?

Increasingly, the acquiring and ISO business has taken the view that advances in technology that originally looked like threats instead made it easier to sell more products and support more payment types. But this opportunity won't last forever.

Seeing a need for virtual and legacy payments worlds to better connect, Push Payments and partner linked2pay developed a real-time payments system that can function as that connective tissue.