What is difference between US and European Merchant Accounts?

US Merchant Account

Initially, only US banks were providing the credit card processing services to the e-commerce merchants or other stores. After seeing the successful growth in online selling, the banks also started providing e-commerce merchant services for online selling to the merchants.

Now, there are several US banks that offer E-commerce Merchant Accounts, credit card processing services, and other transaction services. And this rise in the number of banks affected the prices and grew to be bargain-able or competitive. Also, if the merchant is not a resident of the US then he cannot get a Merchant account. But, all this comes to an end when European e-commerce merchant accounts came into existence and became available for Merchants.

European Merchant Account

In order to have a European Merchant Account or credit card processing services, a merchant does not require to be a US citizen, which means you could get a Merchant account from anywhere in the world. The European Merchant Account provides an award-winning gateway to the merchants. Now the Merchants have two options, which are the US and the European Merchant Accounts, to choose either one of them according to their convenience.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE US AND THE EUROPEAN MERCHANT ACCOUNTS

Pricing

There is a huge difference in the prices between the US and the European Merchant Accounts in terms of the gateway, setup fees, and discount rates etc. The European merchant accounts are way higher in prices than the US Merchant Accounts. The cost of the US Merchant Accounts decreased due to the high competition among the US banks. Unlike US banks, there is no such competition for the European Merchant accounts which leads to a higher cost. European Banks offer their services all over the world while the US banks provide their services in the US only.

Quality

In terms of the quality of the services, both the banks are equal. Both the US and European Merchant Accounts offering the same credit card processing services like VISA and MasterCard etc. Even though the banks are using the best credit card processing services and security services there also be a possibility of scams. The quality can be checked in terms of the time of approval, safety, and security etc. As we are all aware that a different gateway technique is used by every credit card processing service, which helps to keep the data safe. Also, there is no difference in the time of approval between both the US and the European Merchant Accounts.

Account Setup and Monitoring:

Availability

Visa Process Smoother and Faster for Entrepreneurs

The new visa route, devised with Brexit in mind, is intended to make the visa process smoother and faster for entrepreneurs and was introduced by home secretary Sajid Javid this week during London Tech Week. It will be launched in Spring 2019.

“We want to do more to attract businesses to the UK and our migration system plays a key part in that,” Javid said. “This will help to ensure we continue to attract the best global talent and maintain the UK’s position as a world-leading destination for innovation and entrepreneurs.” The new start-up visa scheme will need applicants to have an endorsement from a UK university or approved UK-based business sponsor, including start-up accelerators.

The cost of the visa and any cap has not yet been decided but a Home Office spokesman said: “This visa will replace the Tier 1 (Graduate Entrepreneur) visa route, which was only open to graduates, so opening that route up to a wider pool. The cap on that was 2,000 per year and we do not expect the cap on this to be less than that.”

Antony Walker, deputy CEO, tech UK, UK’s technology trade body, said: “The new startup visas are a sensible move to encourage those with good ideas to come to the UK. However, for many mid-tier and larger tech companies, there remain serious concerns around Tier 2 visas. We understand that approximately 1,000 tech workers with job offers were refused visas between December 2017 and March 2018. This is a handbrake on economic growth and needs to be urgently addressed.

How to Credit Card Annual Percentage Rate (APR) Could Double?

Credit Card APRs are ridiculously high, averaging 16.75 percent, according to the latest data from Credit Cards (That’s a record high, by the way.) But make a payment misstep, and you could face almost double that astronomical rate for months afterward.

If you’re more than 60 days late on your minimum credit card payment, your issuer may apply a “penalty APR,” which can reach as high as 29.99 percent, according to Credit Karma. This higher rate can be applied to your current and future balances for six months.

When six months have passed, your creditor is required to reevaluate your rates, per Credit. If you’ve made all your payments on-time during those months, you should hopefully have your rate returned to normal.

To find out what your issuer charges, read through your card’s terms and conditions. Not every card applies the penalty—Chase, Citi and Discover offer cards with no penalty APR, according to LendEu—though many do, and those without penalties will likely have stricter requirements. Make sure your payments are on time (or early) by either automating them or setting a calendar reminder when your bill is due.

You need to make at least the minimum payment in order to keep your baseline APR, though you should aim to pay off your entire bill each month so you don’t fall into debt. For help on that, check out some of our debt resources.

Today Lower of Credit Card Processing Fees

United Thinkers, a New-York based commercial open-source Payment Management Software provider has released guidelines for merchants and payment facilitators that want to improve their current transaction processing terms.

United Thinkers published a manual, providing guidance for companies that are not satisfied by fees, that they currently pay for processing credit cards and other electronic payments. Is your company in a similar situation? Maybe, you think that your current processing arrangement is not that bad, but processing fees seem a little too high, especially if your transaction processing volume is large and growing. Or, perhaps, transaction processing fees themselves are fine, but if you add tokenization, gateway, and other fees to them, the amount looks rather significant. Possibly, having carefully analyzed your overall transaction processing-related you realize that it is much larger than you initially thought because of some hidden fees that you have just identified. If any of these statements are relevant for your case, then the guidelines are for you. 

In the document United Thinkers experts describe the most frequently used strategies that their customers resort to in order to analyze and reduce their transaction processing costs. They identify the mistakes that people make and explain why many of the common strategies are inefficient. The commonly implemented intuitive strategy involves either negotiating better terms with the current processing partner or looking for a new processor that can offer better terms. However, these approaches often do not result in desired savings. The guidelines explain the reasons for this phenomenon and list the disadvantages of the commonly used approaches. They provide a better framework to properly understand what your true processing cost is. The document includes useful suggestions on how you can identify all of the aspects that contribute to the cost of processing and provide effective overall cost reduction strategies, focusing on each particular cost item.

Particularly, the guidelines authors describe the strategy of processing cost reduction through processing consolidation. United Thinkers successfully uses the strategy to improve the situation for its large-size corporate clients through the implementation of UniPay Gateway technology in the already existing payment ecosystems. 

"Many of the companies we are working with are not satisfied with pricing terms of their existing processing relationships. So we feel that we had to do something about it. Our new processing cost reduction guidelines are based on our rich experience of helping clients to establish successful processing relationships. They allow the readers to address the issue of processing cost reduction in a broader and smarter way," says United Thinkers president, Eugene Kipnis. "The key to actual savings is not necessarily the reduction of processing cost itself. Sometimes it might be beneficial to take a closer look at other cost items, such as indirect or opportunity costs.