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by berlinbrown
4641 days ago
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We work with credit card vendors and to me, it seems like an easy business. You have many companies that want to be PCI compliant and they want to save money and they want reliable service. With credit card processing, it is really quite easy . Charge a credit card, validate, reject, etc. Can you handle all of my transactions? Is your API clean? The one issue I see: * Some vendors are slow. E.g. 3-5 second transactions * Too expensive * No good PCI compliant user interface. E.g. if I want to embed an iframe into my application. These are kludgy. Other than that, what a great market to be in. And not just credit card transactions but banking/ach transactions, wire transfers, the whole 9 yards. |
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I used to work at WePay and a lot of the complex technical work we did was to make sure that the craziness and unreliability of the entities lower in the chain never reached our customers. In a credit card transaction there are multiple parties including the issuing bank, the acquiring bank, the processor, the gateway, the card network, etc. Issuing banks in particular often return bogus error codes, time out, or have provide inconsistent results. I remember Delta SkyMiles rewards cards being particularly problematic.
And with payments there is very little margin for error because you are dealing with people's money. Customers get very upset when you cannot charge their card, and it is not helpful to try to explain that the problem is downstream (for example the issuing bank is returning bogus error codes). The worst is the dreaded "general decline"; which is when an issuing bank declines a CC transaction but doesn't tell you why.
The ACH network is even worse. There is no synchronous way to determine if an ACH transaction was actually successful. NSF errors (not sufficient funds) can come in 3 days after the initial transaction. I hope that Dwolla's planned ACH replacement actually takes off because it would be a huge improvement.