I can’t count the number of times that I have been asked to help a merchant decipher their credit card statement. What is worse, is that I have failed to accurately do this several times in the past. Of all areas in the credit card processing industry that needs a touch up, statements rank near the top of my list. Compare your monthly statement to another business. Even if you both process through the same company, chances are that your statements look completely different. Not just in numbers which is expected, but in terms and layout as well.

Merchant Service Providers are the group that is responsible for providing their customers with good support. Unfortunately Merchant Service Providers have no control over how a statement is calculated or laid out. This is entirely up to the processor that the merchant is processing through. Processors seem to try and make the statement as difficult as possible to understand. Processors also like to change the layout of the statements about every 6 months. Just when you think you are starting to understand your statement, they go and change the whole thing.

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In light of recent news about major credit card and personal information breaches, credit card security seems to be a suitable topic for today’s post.

Credit card and personal information security have become major topics with recent large security breaches. It is unfortunate that a large company like CardSystems was the victim of one of the largest security breaches in history. It seems like almost every other day I read about a new breach of security. These are almost never small businesses, but rather large, well-trusted Fortune 500 corporations. This makes me wonder, if these huge trusted corporations that spend millions of dollars a year making sure that their data is protected are loosing customer data the easily, then how bad can this problem be at the small business level?

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Welcome to the merchant account blog. This is where you can find news and information about the credit card processing industry. We search the web daily and find information that is important so you don’t have to.