Mitch,
EPOCH has been reporting transaction and chargeback counts by individual URL to
VISA for a long time now. And yes, VISA can request that an individual site or
company be shut down within a 3rd Party Processor?s portfolio, as I stated
earlier.
I believe the difference in what you do vs. what we, CCBill and ibill do is
that we, as 3rd party processors, utilize our experience and risk management
techniques to assist our clients in maintaining compliance with card
association guidelines, FTC guidelines and other areas concerning law
enforcement matters and the like. Our entire business is focused on risk
management and compliance because we have skin in the game, which means we are
ultimately financially responsible if things go wrong.
The way I understand your business is that you are a broker of merchant
accounts. You offer a fee for service features. You also may make money from the bank
where you set up the merchant and from the merchant. The entire financial risk
is up to the Webmaster. Therefore, if something goes wrong, and a lot of times
something does go wrong, with an individual site or Webmaster, your clients are
toast if you burn up your bank with a client that goes wild.
We have forged a strong alliance with the card associations and we deal with
the largest banks in the world. This has taken many years. The trust that we
have developed with Visa is because our entire operation, risk management
policies and end-to-end solution, backed up by our financial risk taking, means
that webmasters may get a bit better than the "hint, hint, slap" that KK so
aptly applied to Visa. We are perfectly aligned with our client?s interests.
So to sum it up, we do everything in our power to ensure that our clients
remain compliant while at the same time make as much money as they can. We at
EPOCH believe that webmasters want to focus on their core competencies;
delivering quality content by marketing to the public. EPOCH, CCBill, iBill
and companies like ours allow the webmasters to do what they do best, with a
minimum amount of risk. And everyone remember... Having your own merchant
account is not a new idea. It proved for many to be a mistake years ago.
Clay
http://www.epochsystems.com