You don’t need to run a high-risk business to experience payment processing problems. Your incoming payments can be slow, flat, or even ground to a halt for a number of reasons: payment delays, payment defaults, slow processing, rejected transactions or hidden fraudulent activity.
As a business owner, what can you do and what are the potential consequences?
- Pursue Debtors: Tracking down debtors through a collection agency or hiring someone to investigate illegal transactions costs time and money.
- Exact Penalties: Zinging clients and customers with late fees, threatening contract termination, going through a dunning process or taking legal action all do little to cement client/customer relationships, build a good business brand or increase cash flow.
- Risk Merchant Account Closure: The bank or financial institution where you opened your merchant account might decide to cancel its services and close your account instead of helping you resolve your accounts receivable dilemma.
- Face Business Foreclosure or Takeover: Your company, especially if it’s registered as an LLC, might face business foreclosure or have a court-ordered lien against its assets. Business assets can include commercial property or homes used for commercial purposes.
Adverse payment situations pose a barrier to a company’s progress. But retaliatory action against non-paying clients, customers and business partners can eventually land a business in the high-risk category.
In the past, business owners in dire straits would often search for buyers or liquidate their assets and close shop to circumvent more risk. Today, more businesses are discovering that companies such as Premier One Payments, which provides high-risk processing services, can expedite the payment process.
But before jumping on board with any payment processor, here are a few tips to help you spot potential risks and avoid pitfalls:
- Assess Your Risk Level: Depending on your business risk level and your own approach to risk management, you can expect to pay higher account fees for payment processing and other high-risk merchant account services.
- Gather Information and Comparison Shop: Unless you do some homework, you might discover your high-risk merchant service provider has a less-than-stellar reputation. Review as many companies as possible and do comparison shopping. Are court cases pending? Are there garnishes or liens against these businesses?
- Going Out of Business: The company that handles your high-risk payment processing might abruptly go out of business. If you sense or know this might happen, terminate your account and walk away.
- Don’t Be Exploited: Some high-risk payment processors exploit high-risk businesses by extracting more fees and/or hiking their rates. Small businesses are particularly susceptible. Be sure to weed out the bad actors before signing on with a high-risk payment processor. Look at BBB ratings, read customer reviews and scour social media for signs of unethical or unorthodox practices. Better still, listen to advice from family, friends and business professionals.
- Evaluate Service Quality: Not every high-risk payment processor cares about fraud or negligence. Nor is every high-risk processor a full merchant services provider. Evaluate your business model, security level, and accounts receivable and billing needs. Make sure everything aligns with the payment processing services you want.
Premier One Payments understands what high-risk businesses go through. Our company offers merchant accounts that help businesses affordably accept credit cards and other types of payments (phone, mobile apps, checks, ACH, wire, secure gateway) for secured processing. By stabilizing our merchant fees and rates and not exercising penalties for low-volume transactions or high-volume chargebacks, we have helped customers grow their businesses and reach more markets. Our ability to process all types of payment transactions in a timely manner has helped businesses manage their expenses, increase their customer base and, of course, generate more recurring payments. We accept payments from customers in the U.S., Canada and other countries. Payments issued in different currencies are not an issue, since we deal with foreign exchanges.
In addition to high-risk payment processing, Premier One Payments has other merchant services for businesses. If your business is starting up or has been around for a while, contact us to learn what we’re about. You’ll discover the benefits of a business partnership with us.