Heaven

So there you are, laying on a bed in a mostly dark room with your ten month old granddaughter. You're on your side, and she's on her back, snuggled in against you. You're propping your head up with one hand, and the other is on her belly. she has your index finger clutched in her tiny hand, and every few seconds she strokes the back of of your hand with her two littlest fingers. She's looking up at you with an expression that tells you that not only does she believe you are responsible for the very oxygen she is breathing, but she is also firmly convinced you are going to keep her safe and happy for all her days.

There will come a day that you let her down; it's impossible not to. No one can stay atop a pedestal the size she has placed you on forever. But that day hasn't come yet, and unlike you, she doesn't know it will.

So as she snuggles in even tighter and shuts her eyes, drifting into dreamland you thank God for giving us the gift of little girls.

'Spend Graphs' are Here

The next stage of shopping evolution has begun, courtesy of American Express' new spend graph program.

Spend graphing is the combination of GPS technology and high speed data mining capabilities. Your credit card issuers have been tracking your spending habits since the day you made your very first pulled out a piece of plastic rather than cash. Very complicated algorithms give the card company the power to predict to the penny how much you will spend, for what items, at what store, with amazing (or frightening) accuracy. These models predicting your spending habits have existed in a vacuum until recently- the missing variable was the 'when' you would make the purchase, and without a when, the what, where, and how many couldn't be acted upon. Enter global positioning satellites.

The card companies figured out there was no need to guess when you would make a purchase if  GPS technology could tell them when you were walking into a store.

Based on that, American Express now offers their cardholders the ability to receive to their mobile form or tablet real time offers.

Once a cardholder opts into the system it works as follows- GPS telemetry pick up that a member has just walked into Macy's. Amex has stored on it's servers that you spend $400 a month at Macy's, at an average of $200 per visit, and that 50 percent of your purchases are women's clothing, and that 75 percent of that is spend on Calvin Klein dresses and active wear.

Almost immediately upon entering the store, you are alerted to a new text, and therein is an offer for 30 percent off of all Calvin Klein women's wear- good for the next hour only.

Privacy advocates are howling about the program, but American Express calls in a win for consumers and businesses alike.

"In an increasingly crowded marketplace, where consumers are bombarded with daily deals, we saw an opportunity to help our Cardmembers save time as well as money by curating meaningful offers for them," said Josh Silverman, president of the U.S. Consumer Services Group at American Express. "At the same time we can help our merchant partners build their business by helping them reach the right Cardmembers with the right offer at the right time. We developed our mobile offer engine with three key points of differentiation in mind; relevance, convenience and value."

MasterCard Issues Security Alert

MasterCard has issued an alert that some merchants have received fraudulent 'MasterCard Security Alert' email messages. The messages refer to a fictitious recent hacking attempt, and ask the merchant to run a 'test transaction' to determine if they were affected by the hack.

MasterCard said this is an attempt by an outside party to gain transaction information. Once the outside party has the stolen information they can use it to try to make purchases and get refunds.

The company said if any merchant receives an unsolicited email, phone call, text message or social media request from an individual or organization purporting to be a MasterCard security representative do not respond. Instead report the attempt at the following address: datasecurity@mastercard.com.

Ten Reasons Why a Payment Gateway is Better for Your Business

1. Card on file. Merchants have a secure way to store credit/debit card and checking account details so they can charge their regular customers without requiring them to present a card or check.
2. Email receipts.  With a gateway merchants can send receipts their customers can easily store electronically.
3. No extra hardware to maintain. Why have multiple devices to manage and pay for when most businesses have personal computers on site already?
4. Unlimited users who can log on from anywhere.  With the merchant's express permission, their bookkeeper can log in from their office to get transaction reports, clerks can log on from the front desk to process payments and merchants can log in from any Internet connection to check on the business from anywhere in the world. 
5. PCI Compliance. Most payment gateways are continually updated to remain fully PCI compliant while most existing POS terminals simply aren’t PCI DSS compliant.  After the massive recent data breaches with Global Payments, Sony et al., this issue will become increasingly important as the card associations start cracking down on non-compliance.
6. Customer Data at your fingertips. Gateways  generally support loading customer information which gives the merchant a great way to communicate with their customers for promotions and loyalty.
7. Re-Occurring Payments . With a gateway re-occurring payments need only to be entered one time, and told how often to occur. 
8. Doesn’t tie up a phone line.  Standard POS terminals use phone lines to communicate with the processor which requires merchants to either lose their line while the transactions process or get a second phone line which is often times more expensive than the monthly fee for a gateway.
9. Rental/lease fees.  Merchants often pay $30-$80/month to rent or lease their POS terminals which is more expensive than simply using a payment gateway.
10. Marketing.  With a gateway, receipts can be printed on preprinted sheets that market the Merchant’s business. They are larger than normal receipts so a consumer will be more inclined to keep them and respond to a marketing message than if it’s printed on a small POS terminal receipt.   What a great way to incent your customers to save your marketing message.  With a VPOS, you can actually turn your credit card processing into a great new way to make grow your business! 

Every Processing Company's Niightmare

Global Payments announced Friday that 1.5 million credit card numbers from its systems may have been exposed after detecting “unauthorized access” into its processing system. Global is a processing company that moves the money around for the parties involved in a credit card transaction.  The company said that 1.5 million records may have been exposed, from Visa and MasterCard. Global said that while credit card numbers may have been exposed, personal information such as names, addresses and Social Security numbers were “not obtained by the criminals.”


Global detected the breach in “early March,” but has not specified when exactly the attack took place or how it happened. According to the latest statement released by Global, the breach has been “contained.” The company said it is working with “industry third parties, regulators and law enforcement to assist in the efforts to minimize potential cardholder impact.” It is also working with security and forensics firms to get to the bottom of the access.

Visa Inc. has dropped the card processor involved in a massive data breach from its registry of providers that meet data security standards.

Global Payments CEO Paul Garcia noted that the company continues to process Visa transactions, but that being dropped from the registry “could give our partners some pause that they’re doing business with someone who experienced a breach.”

The company said it will set up a website later Monday to help consumers who might be affected by the breach. Visa and Mastercard's systems were not compromised.

The company said it continues to work with regulators, industry third parties and law enforcement to help in the effort to minimize the potential impact on credit cardholders.

Google Is The New Phone Book

Last year, social media guru/ sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer rented an office for the summer in a 41 unit building outside New York. On the day he moved in, the local phone company dropped off 41 phone books in the building's lobby. All summer, as he came and went, he watched those books. They sat there. And sat, and sat, and sat. At the end of September, as he left the building for the final time, curious, he counted the phone books still sitting and gathering dust. There were thirty nine.


Your customers don't look you up in the phone book anymore. A cattle hauler from Wyoming who breaks down on the Pittsburg bypass doesn't go to the nearest gas station for a phone book- he googles diesel mechanics.


Where are you going to be when someone googles your business? First? Near the Top? On the first page? If you're not at least on the first page you're business is in trouble, whether the receipts show it or not.


The beauty is that it's easy to get near the top of a Google search. You don't have to understand search engine optimization, you don't have to pay a company thousands of dollars. All you have to do is take advantage of business social media.


Have a business Facebook page that you post on at least three times a week. Have, and use, a twitter page.  Make sure your Twitter profile contains all the words and phrases someone might use in a search for your business. For example, my Twitter page says I am a "Profitability Improvement Specialist- Credit Card processing, Merchant Services, Electronic Payments at Central Payment". It may not flow off the tongue, but every time I tweet Google is reading, and saving, those words and phrases in conjunction with my name. ( A friend calls using key search words in this way "spreading Google dust").


Have, and use, an account with LinkedIn. LinkedIn especially gives you four or five different places for you to use your key words. In my personal opinion, it is also the best place for posting valuable content that gets noticed by your peers.


When your done with all that, start a Youtube account. After you post a value message, record yourself speaking it, and post it to your account. And- you guessed it- use your key words as often as possible.


It is not time consuming to set this up. You can set up accounts, with your key-word laden profiles, at all four sites in less than an hour. And you can set it up to when you post a message at one site, your other sites pick it up. In other words, you can post a tweet on twitter that automatically shows up on Facebook and LinkedIn.


Now comes the fun part. At night, while you are warm and comfy in your bed, the Google fairies scan the web, collecting your Google dust and applying it to your name. 


It is amazing how quickly this will rocket you to the top of Google searches for your name, your business, and your keywords. If you have never set up a business social media site, try this experiment. Google your name, and note at what page and page location you find yourself. Do the above for one week, and Google your name again. If you are not in the first five entries on the first page I'll eat my shoe.


Track and play with your keywords. When I started using Google dust my name would come up near the top of a search for 'credit card processing', but not 'merchant services.' I found new places in my  profiles to use the phrase 'merchant services' and for a week every time I posted anywhere I used the  phrase in the title of the post. When I tested again at the end of the week, mine was the second name to come up when I searched.


Google is the new phone book. And you have control over the size of you r phone book ad. You can have a little two inch square ad and never be found on Google, or you can have the back cover and come up first in Google searches for your business. The cost is the same- the centerfold takes a little bit of work.

Some Miscellaneous Stuff

Here are a few bits of news important to credit card processing, that may be relevant to your business.

Omni 3740 and 3750 say goodbye. Nearly every processor I know of says they will no longer support these terminals, most as of October 2012. That means if you have one, come November, it will no longer process cards. The most common replacements are the Verifone VX510 (for dial up accounts) and the VX570 (internet processing.) Those are Central Payments free terminals, so if you have an old Omni you can upgrade for free.

Visa is introducing a new fee in April. A 'fixed acquirer network fee, it will add $2.00 to $2.90 to most merchant accounts. Theoretically a business can recoup the costs through a lowered network fee, but don't count on it. When this was first announced it seemed some processors (including Central Payment) were leaning toward assuming the fee on behalf it's merchants, but now all the processing companies are treating it as a pass-through. The fee can be very expensive for companies with thousands of locations that process millions of dollars (read: Wal Mart and McDonalds) and if the processors assume the $2.00 for Bob's Diner they will have to assume the hundreds of thousands of dollars for the mega-merchants also.

And finally, The IRS formally drives processors to the brink of ruin for no good reason.  As most of you are probably aware, the IRS decided "it would not require merchants to explain how and why their business income differs from their credit card receipts in 2012, nor do we intend to require reconciliation in future years.

Now that processing companies have spent millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of man hours, trying to match merchant information with what the government had on file, not to mention scaring the beJesus out of merchants with the punishment nightmares they (the merchants) would face for non-compliance- the IRS says "Just kiddin." This comes after some processing companies spent a year charging merchants up to $20.00 a month for 'IRS compliance', too.

That's what's happening in my world- if you have any questions about any of the above, or electronic payment processing in general, holler to me at bswitzer@cpay.com.