Many payment industry players, including merchants, ordinary and wholesale independent sales organizations (ISOs), payment facilitators, and payment service providers (PSPs) are not satisfied by their payment processing relationships, because their current processors do not support some particular technical features they need and are unwilling to implement the necessary logic.
Besides transaction processing cost, technical features are an important criterion of payment processing partner selection. Specific factors include ease of integration with the processor’s platform, user-friendly reconciliation and settlement logic, clear reporting mechanisms and report formats, support for soft transaction descriptors, efficient chargeback disputing procedures, fraud prevention, specific payment types (ACH, EBT, gift and loyalty cards etc). ISOs and facilitators might be particularly interested in more advanced features, such as batch transaction processing, automated declined transaction recycling, merchant onboarding and provisioning, etc.
As ISOs, payment facilitators, and payment service providers, need to process payments of other businesses (merchants from their portfolios), they need processors to support functions related to merchant life-cycle (from onboarding to chargeback management).
If your current processor does not support some of the features you need, then, naturally, you can either request it to add these particular features to its product/platform or migrate to a new processor. Migration of merchants and data from one processor to another is, itself, a challenging task, requiring a clear strategy. However, sometimes, it is the only way possible. The situation is, actually, quite common for many companies that are initially satisfied by a service package offered by the processor, but as they evolve, new requirements emerge, which the processor might be unable to satisfy.
A useful tip for any company that is looking for an optimal processing partnership is to discuss the most important features with the processor, first and foremost. If your potential processing partner does not support the features that are most important for you or your sub-merchants, then it might be of no avail to continue negotiations with it.
More information on these and other problems and on the ways of their solution can be found in the guide on the fundamentals of payment processing.
