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All the other drama aside, this is my take on the whole situation:
The guys from TMM are really making some big moves in the industry and I applaud them for it. They are quickly becoming a one stop shop, and I can see why some people on the boards and in private might feel alittle threatened. With the addition of their own in house billing solutions they can bring their NATS Affiliate System software even further than it is right now.
If they take some of the new knowledge from SegPay and apply that into their affiliate software they are then at a point where their code can now support an internal gateway system. That would in turn lead to supporting transaction processing for private merchant account affiliate programs (and that is a growing amount of affiliate programs). Someone like SegPay already has the software designed, tested and perfected to fully support recurring billing in a CISP Compliant environment. It then requires affiliate programs to get PCI Complaint before they can satisfy VISA/MC Regulations to run their own gateway. You can now imagine the savings that an affiliate program could make when they can cut their third party gateway provider (as they mostly charge on a per-transaction system) and process their transactions through their own gateway directly built into NATS (locally hosted on the affiliate program's directly owned/leased equipment) and directly supported by TMM.
In regards to the third party biller situation, I would suggest that anyone who has their doubts just not use the company. If your happy with your current processor then why leave? However, I can see that TMM and Segpay have hatched out a plan very similar to the one that Epoch and Mansion did, so this announcement is not a surprise to me.
Jim
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