Whiteboard Wednesday #3: How to choose an acquirer | Clearhaus Learning

Welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday. Today, we will talk about the important things to consider, when you’re choosing your acquirer.

You need to have an acquirer if you want to accept card payments in your online shop. Your acquirer is responsible for processing your payments, specifically, your acquirer is responsible for collecting, holding and paying you the money you receive from customers.

But acquirers are very different - so how do you choose the right one for your business? Let’s see.

Hi, welcome to Whiteboard Wednesday. We are back again to talk to you about how we can help you give some advice on your selecting the right partner for your acquiring parts of the whole jigsaw puzzle in the payment ecosystem.

So, previous session we spoke about the different parts of the transaction. Now, we’re focusing on the acquirer and the questions that you guys can ask to understand if they’re the right partner for you.

So, as an acquirer, as I’ve said, they’re a member of Visa or MasterCard or various card schemes to enable you to process those transactions for the card schemes. So, what else do they do?

They should be talking to you about the various aspects of your business and help you grow and expand your e-Com or mobile site, and they can help you by offering other services to enable you to trade around the world.

So, where do we start? There’s various questions that we can talk about. I think one of the most important things is these guys, the acquirers, will be linked up to gateways, so you will be selecting, in the future, a gateway partner that represents you and your brand and the cashier onto your website. So, find out what gateway partners these guys work with and do they work with the one that you’re thinking of working with in the future.

The acquirer can offer you some consultancy on fraud and chargeback management, so ask them what services they can offer with regards to 3-D Secure, which is a Visa and MasterCard service, which mitigates fraud and chargebacks, and again they can give you more information and also your gateway partner can as well. They can help you, as well, with your PCI in your data security and obviously an important thing for all of us because you as the merchant will be interacting with consumers around the world, ask them what their customer service is like. Is it open 24/7, are they located in different countries, how does that work? Maybe look on Trustpilot for some information. They can also automate services for you via API’s and those services are key when you’re interacting with your consumers.

The chargeback management, reporting, and reconciliation, and also importantly for payouts and refunds as well because you will get consumers coming to your merchants site and they will want to do some refunds for goods and services that you’ve sold, so ask them about the services they offer on the payouts of refunds as well.

I referenced earlier on around the currencies, this is very important. A typical acquirer can enable you and your merchant store to interact with the consumers with card transactions at a local level in a local currency. So typically, some acquirers can offer you a hundred and sixty currencies to accept the card transactions in and also settle the transactions to your bank account in various currencies. So ask those guys what currencies they can accept transactions in and also settle transactions in.

And then finally, a couple of areas as well. Some of your consumers will be repeat consumers, so what services can the acquirer give you for subscriptions and reoccurring transactions. And then finally, some other alternative payment methods the acquirer should be able to offer you, such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.

So I hope that’s helped you. Some of the questions, some of the advice that you need to consider when you’re choosing an acquirer and helping you to trade online.

I hope that’s helped. Thank you.