- Unaffiliated Credit Card Processing Consultant
- Affiliated Credit Card Processing Consultant
- CardFellow: The Best of Both Worlds
A logical step toward finding the best credit card processor is to seek assistance from a credit card processing consultant. It’s a great idea, but once the details and costs of obtaining a consultant become evident, it loses some of its luster. Add to that the fact that you can get the benefits of a consultant through CardFellow without the hefty price tag, and a credit card processing consultant won’t seem like such a great option.
There are generally two types of credit card processing consultants. The first type, which we refer to as unaffiliated, is a consultant that doesn’t work with a processor; instead, they negotiate lower credit card processing fees with a business’s current processor. The next type of consultant, which we refer to as affiliated, attempts to lower a business’s processing costs by switching them to a new credit card processor.
Unaffiliated Credit Card Processing Consultant
Unaffiliated credit card processing consultants generate income by charging their clients a percentage of the savings that they’re able to produce on a monthly basis for a specified contract term. For example, an unaffiliated consultant with a rate of 50% will keep half of the savings they generate for the length of their client’s contract term, which is typically 12-24 months.
Unaffiliated consultants are able to offer unbiased guidance since they’re not affiliated with a particular processor. However, their independence comes with a hefty price tag that is often excessive and disproportionate when compared with other much less expensive options that produce virtually the same amount of savings.
Unaffiliated consultants are generally only interested in working with high-volume clients — especially those that are grossly overpaying for their current processing services because these clients offer the greatest earning potential.
In addition to negotiating lower rates and fees with a client’s current processor, unaffiliated consultants will also monitor a client’s statements and processing behavior in order to optimize the client’s interchange expenses.
Affiliated Credit Card Processing Consultant
Affiliated credit card processing consultants generate income through a residual commission paid by the credit card processors to which they refer clients. They may also charge clients a fee for their services.
Affiliate consultants are inherently biased toward the processors on which their income depends. While this bias may seem counter-productive, it allows affiliated consultants to offer their specialized guidance at a much lower cost than unaffiliated consultants.
Given their direct relationship with one or more credit card processors; there’s virtually no difference between an affiliated consultant and an independent merchant account sales agent. In fact, affiliated consultants are often just that — merchant account sales representatives that refer to themselves as consultants strictly for marketing purposes.
Affiliated consultants are generally less experienced and offer a more superficial service than their unaffiliated counterparts. The bulk of their service is over once they switch a client to a credit card processor with lower processing costs, and they generally don’t provide the ongoing analysis that the income of an unaffiliated consultant depends upon.
CardFellow: The Best of Both Worlds
The ideal solution to lower processing expenses is to avoid credit card processing consultants altogether and instead to seek a processor that offers competitive interchange plus pricing and ongoing consultative support. Of course, doing so is easier said than done — that is until CardFellow came along.
Our goal at CardFellow is to secure the most competitive interchange plus merchant account for your business’s needs. After that, we remain a point of contact and support to ensure that your relationship with your new processors goes smoothly, your rates stay consistent and your interchange fees are as low as possible each month.
By finding a processor through CardFellow, you are ensuring that your business will start with the lowest rates possible and that those rates will remain consistent over time. Along with your new processor, we remain available to help you optimize your business’s interchange expenses, ensure that your business is PCI DSS compliant and assist with questions and general support.
Unlike unaffiliated consultants, you don’t have to pay anything to take advantage of the great service that we offer. And because you receive quotes from multiple processors in an open auction format, we remain a completely unbiased source of support both before and after you select a processor.
We’re able to keep this great service free for you because we receive a small commission from the processors that we work with when you select their quote. The commission we receive is only a fraction of what’s collected by an affiliated consultant, allowing the quotes you receive through CardFellow to be as competitive as possible.
It’s free to sign up for and use CardFellow, and there’s no obligation to accept a quote. The only investment that you’ll have to make is the three minutes that it takes to create a free account.
