As businesses shift online and look to boost their online sales capabilities, most small and mediums businesses (SMBs) have been resorting to services such as Paypal, Stripe, or Square, to handle their online payment transactions.
Known as Payment Service Providers, or PSPs for short, these companies represent a very attractive solution for businesses looking to sell online as they provide easy and quickly deployable solutions. But that proposition comes, literally, at a cost. Let us explore why that is and how Paymath can help your business cut that cost.
Why PSPs?
To be able to offer online payment options, merchants need to have a merchant account – a specific type of bank account for businesses that accepts payments in multiple ways, typically through debit or credit cards, Apple Pay, and so on.
Setting up a merchant account is a complex and time-consuming affair that entails a thorough underwriting process meant to assess the risk of the merchant. This includes background checks, credit history and rating for the business and its owners, the type of products and services that it offers, etc.
PSPs essentially act as middlemen between the merchants and the financial institutions that issue merchant accounts, known as acquiring banks. PSPs open their own merchant accounts, and each time a new merchant signs up with them, the PSP simply creates a new sub-account within his merchant account. For merchants, this setup completely eliminates the hassles of creating a merchant account that we listed above. Signing up with a PSP, by contrast, is an exceedingly simple process that requires basic information, typically name, email, address, and bank account information.
Why PSPs?
To be able to offer online payment options, merchants need to have a merchant account – a specific type of bank account for businesses that accepts payments in multiple ways, typically through debit or credit cards, Apple Pay, and so on.
Setting up a merchant account is a complex and time-consuming affair that entails a thorough underwriting process meant to assess the risk of the merchant. This includes background checks, credit history and rating for the business and its owners, the type of products and services that it offers, etc.
PSPs essentially act as middlemen between the merchants and the financial institutions that issue merchant accounts, known as acquiring banks. PSPs open their own merchant accounts, and each time a new merchant signs up with them, the PSP simply creates a new sub-account within his merchant account. For merchants, this setup completely eliminates the hassles of creating a merchant account that we listed above. Signing up with a PSP, by contrast, is an exceedingly simple process that requires basic information, typically name, email, address, and bank account information.
But at What Cost?
Being part of a larger pool of sub accounts means that you will be charged a risk premium that accounts for the risk associated with all the other merchants registered under the same parent account. As you have probably guessed, since signing up with a PSP does not require any financial diligence, merchants end up paying a higher premium – typically between 0.5% and 1% more than they would have paid for with their own merchant accounts.
Furthermore, PSPs’ lack of intimate knowledge about the individual working of its clients means that they are more prone to misjudge financial transactions as fraudulent, adding a heightened risk of erroneous account freezing or even shutdown.
Enter Paymath
Paymath is a Fintech consultancy company that is able to help ecommerce businesses best select, set up, and run online payment options in a more cost efficient manner compared to PSPs.
Paymath undertakes underwriting and creating the merchant accounts for its clients totally hassle free. Through its partnerships with financial technology solutions providers, the company is able to help its clients set up their payment systems using the tools that best fit their needs and optimize conversion by creating a superior customer experience.
Paymath represents a cost-effective, long-term solution for merchants. To put this in numbers, Merchant Service Providers’ fees average around 2.3% per transaction, whereas the typical fee for a transfer through a PSP hovers around 2.9%. This may not seem much, but as your online sales grow, the extra costs add up and could potentially reach tens of thousands of dollars depending on your sales volume – using the rates above for example, a merchant making $500,000 in yearly sales would save $3,000 in transaction costs. Put differently, that’s 50% of the payment processing markup fees that becomes available to you to reinvest in your business.
