1) How many stops do your payments make prior to settling in your bank account?

Most of the horror stories you hear about merchants not receiving their payments are because the payment services provider they're using is not really a payment processor in the true sense of the word, meaning they do not have a direct relationship with an acquiring bank but rather have an account which they aggregate payments in. And because the way these accounts are set up there may be three or four people in between the real people processing these transactions to the acquiring bank and the groups that portray themselves to be processing your transactions. There are a couple determining factors that will show if your account is set up like one of these.

A) Your payments are made in arrears one to two weeks or more.

The top International and Offshore Acquiring banks settle payments at the end of every week to their authorized processor, sometimes twice a week. If your payments are setup 1 or 2 or more weeks in Arrears, it’s usually because there are 3 of 4 people (Unnecessarily) involved in the handling of your transactions and each one must get the wire and do their accounting and take their cut.

B) You do not know who your true acquiring bank is.

If there is a shroud of secrecy around your account and where the transactions are acquired and what bank pays you and so on, it could be one of several things, the most common being that the person processing your transactions is a broker several layers down and does not know himself who is the acquiring bank. OR

They Do not want you to have a contact name to check and see if they are an authorized processor or when the money is held or the account closed they want to be able to tell you the mystery bank is holding your funds and by the time six months have passed they are gone with your reserve and other funds and there is no way to track them.

With bank mid you have a contract with the acquiring bank any which of ours you may be using is a top ten bank ranked by assets. Your payments come direct from the acquiring bank and because of the direct relationship your payments are settled into your bank account every Tuesday for the previous week’s transactions.

2) Is your Payment providers gateway PCIS compliant?
PCIS Is the Visa/MC standard for protecting consumer’s data.

While not being PCIS compliant does not mean youir dealing with crooks it does mean that they are not following Visa rules and regulations which exposes themselves and your processing to fines and penalties and perhaps closed accounts. The following has been on the horizon for the last two years but recently Visa has become very serious about this.

Visa U.S.A. Inc. is adopting a carrot-and-stick approach to help drive merchant compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard that it -- along with other credit card companies such as MasterCard International Inc. and American Express Co. Earlier this week, the company announced that it has created a new $20 million incentive program under which it will monetarily reward "acquiring" financial institutions if their members are fully compliant with PCI requirements by Aug. 31, 2007. At the same time, acquiring banks that fail to ensure compliance by Sept. 30, 2007, will be assessed fines starting at $5,000 a month for each noncompliant merchant. The fines increase to $25,000 per month for each noncompliant merchant after Dec. 31, 2007.
Not every merchant accepting credit cards needs to adapt to PCIS standards however there are forms that must be submitted by your processor on your behalf. Whether it's just forms or a complete compliance check we will work with you and file necessary forms and such to insure you will not face any fines ort penalties.

While these are just a short list of the perils that face merchants and their payment processing these are certainly issues that should be answered prior to making a decision on who will handle your business income from credit card transactions .
If you have any questions about this or any other payment processing related issues these feet please feel free to contact us at:
webmaster@bankmid.com

A quick way to resolve allot of problems that face merchants is to have your own merchant account and not share an account with other merchants.
  There seems to be a fair amount of confusion regarding having your own merchant account and using a third-party account.
Some of these are:
Pricing: the truth is having your own merchant account is no more expensive than it processing through a third-party account in that you may pay a little more for the set up of that account but you save that much every month in the discounted processing rate.
If you are new business you won't be approved for a direct merchant account: we provide a merchant accounts for new businesses as well as established businesses and does not matter if you have less than perfect credit or have had problems in the past with previous processing accounts.

MasterCard Inc. and Visa USA Inc. are clamping down on merchants that flout rules aimed at protecting card transactions from fraudsters. In recent weeks, MasterCard has imposed fines on merchants that haven't met its requirements to keep transactions secure. Starting Saturday, Visa will take aim at the nation's largest merchants with fines that start at $10,000 a month and can rise to $100,000 a month. Wall Street Journal 2/2007