How to Accept Credit Cards for Payment

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Bill Rae, I'm with Alumni Financial Services out of Seminole, Florida. I've been in the business of the finance world for well over thirty years. We have an interesting question today. How to accept credit cards for payments? I'm going to have to take the assumption that if you're asking that question, you're obviously in business or starting a business. And looking for a way to take money in for products or services you sell. Now the credit card business, there are plenty of people, plenty of companies out there that would come in and offer to do the processing for you. That means when you swipe the card on the machine, who actually takes that information. And gets it to the bank and gets it back into your account and separates the payments for those services. To the companies that will ultimately be your processing. When we look at this industry, it is vast, it's very competitive but all roads tend to lead to three or four major processors in the world. So we're going to stay on the very basics today of how to accept a credit card processing. First of all, like everything else in business, it is all predicated and based on risk. When a credit card processing company takes a look at you, they're going to want to know, are you a legitimate business? What kind of risk are involved in assisting you in taking payments. In other words, are you going to have a lot of people come in and ask for their money back? Do you have a good credit history? So when you're looking at credit card processing from that point of view. Do keep in mind that again, everything is predicated on risks. And you still have to have a decent credit score yourself. If you're not an established company that's been in business for a while. Once you do that, there are numerous machines on the market, there are numerous ways of taking payments. I'm going to boil it down to just basically four levels of credit card processing, in today's environment. You have your qualified rate, your unqualified, your mid qualified and what we now call a pass through, debit cards. Which is a huge part of the business right now. By the way, don't forget checks. Today's technology allows you to take a check and turn it into a credit card transaction. With that being said, there's a new company on the market called Simplicity, that's offering some excellent rates. But do your homework, there's several companies out there. Talk to us, we'll steer you in the right direction. My name is Bill Rae, Alumni Financial Services, hope that helped."