Recently the term “payment facilitator” has gained popularity. The role of payment facilitators at the merchant services market has grown significantly. The concept of a payment facilitator is actively promoted in the merchant services industry. Consequently, more and more companies consider the idea of assuming the role of payment facilitators.
Problem
A business, selling merchant accounts, is currently functioning as ISO, but wants to become a payment facilitator.
Context
An ISO, generally, relies on other entities in many aspects of its activity. If a business needs to get a merchant account (purchase it from an ISO), the ISO needs to address some other entity (usually, the payment processor) to handle this issue.
Traditionally, the model functioned as follows. ISOs and software companies, which performed the role of ISOs for their clients, referred their clients to the processors and helped sell the accounts, relying on external gateway. Underwriting and funding was handled by the processors. With time, as the number of clients increased, they realized that the model was not very effective. As a result, payment card associations suggested the concept of payment facilitators, which provided these new entities with greater control over the processes of MID issuing, merchant funding etc.
ISOs have various reasons for becoming payment facilitators.
As we’ve mentioned in one of our articles, a payment facilitator actively participates in sub-merchant funding, and each of its sub-merchants is funded under a separate MID. In view of these functions, to become a payment facilitator, an entity needs to perform several important steps and answer some critical questions.
Strategy
Finding a processing partner
If you are an ISO, you already have a certain number of merchant accounts to support.
- Are you going to become a payment facilitator with your current payment processor, or find a new processing partner? In either case, as mentioned in the respective article, you will have to sign a separate agreement with your processing partner, and go through the payment facilitator underwriting process.
- If you are switching to a new payment processor, what is the plan for migration of your merchants? Will all the existing merchants from your portfolio be able to go through underwriting process with the new payment processor? If not, what is the “plan B” for those merchants, which are unable to do that? Some tips on migration to a new processor can be found here.
Pricing strategy and underwriting
If you are going to change our processing partner, you need to carefully study the following two issues:
- What are the underwriting requirements of the given processor? Which documents and guarantees are required? What are the requirements for merchant services reserves? Remember, that before being able to underwrite your sub-merchants, you need to go through underwriting procedure with the payment processor yourself.
- What transaction pricing model is offered by your potential processing partner? More information on transaction pricing models can be found in our previous articles, such as this one.
Technical aspects
You need to address several technical aspects. Mostly, these concern the peculiarities of new integration(s).
- What types of payment cards and transactions do you need to support?
- How will the new merchants be set up? How will the new MIDs be issued? What is the merchant underwriting mechanism you are going to use? If merchant information changes over time, how will those changes be delivered? In other words, what is the strategy for merchant on-boarding and provisioning?
- Who will implement KYC (know your customer) logic, verification procedures? Is it going to be the processor or your own development team?
- How will sub-merchant funding, remittance, statement generation, and reporting be organized?
- Do you need card-present solutions (which, naturally, call for usage of physical payment terminals)? Which terminals are you going to use? Which processor(s) is(are) going to support particular solutions (card-present and card-not-present, or some others)? If several processors are going to be involved, then merchant on-boarding, funding, and chargeback handling procedures have to be worked out for each of the processors. If you need to process only card-not-present transactions, do you need to handle recurring payments and batch transaction processing? How are you going to handle these tasks? What is your solution for merchant information updating (account updater functionality)?
- Are you going to handle most of the abovementioned processes manually? If yes, you need to develop training materials for your personnel. Otherwise (if the processes are going to be automated), you need to launch the respective development projects in order to implement the necessary logic.
PCI compliance and fraud protection
What is your status in terms of PCI compliance? What fraud protection mechanisms are available? In order to ensure the security of all the processes, you need to go through appropriate PCI audit as a prospective payment facilitator, and implement the best fraud protection tools you can find.
Conclusion
Becoming a payment facilitator, you are getting more control of merchant funding and underwriting processes, but you are also assuming greater risks and responsibilities. Your transition strategy must include all the aspects, needed to ensure smooth handling of the whole life-cycle of your sub-merchants.
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