Finding the Best Merchant Account for a Collection Agency
If you’re operating a collection agency (or planning to start one), you’ve no doubt come across one monumental challenge already: the difficulty of getting a merchant account. This can hamper your ability to handle transactions professionally, and ultimate acts as a thorn in the side of your business, preventing quick growth. So first of all: why do you need a merchant account for a collection agency, why is it so hard to get one, and what can you do about it?
Why Do You Need a Merchant Account?
A merchant account is simply the easiest and most professional way to process payments. Having your own merchant account will help you avoid hefty per-transaction fees attached to third-party payment processors such as Paypal. With your own merchant account, you can easily and instantly process credit card transactions.
The Problems
The benefits of a merchant account are clear for a collection agency – but why is it so difficult to get one?
Simply because collection agencies are viewed as being a ‘high risk’ business by most banks and other transaction processing institutions. As a collection agency, your role is to collect outstanding debts – and obviously, there will always be a certain percentage of debtors who are unable to pay and simply declare bankruptcy or go through the court system. As a result, cashflow can be highly unpredictable and it’s often impossible to say which debts will be collected and which won’t.
It’s this uncertainty which makes typical merchant account providers – such as banks – wary of dealing with collection agencies. Even when they do offer merchant accounts to debt collectors, they often come with some pretty ghastly set-up fees and ongoing transaction fees that eliminate many of the perks of having a merchant account in the first place. In some cases you will even be expected to put a percentage of your profits into escrow every month, in the event that you end up with unpaid bills due to failure to collect debt payments, or legal troubles over credit card transactions that have been disputed.
How We Can Help
eMerchantBroker specializes in dealing with exactly this kind of high risk business, providing an affordable and effective merchant account solution.
We acknowledge that collection agencies are legitimate businesses and shouldn’t be blacklisted from having a merchant account purely because of the industry they operate in – so we’ve become ‘high risk specialists’ aiming to provide merchant accounts to high risk businesses without any of the extra fees charged by banks and ISOs.
Our consultants have plenty of experience dealing with businesses like yours – chances are, we’ve already dealt with dozens or hundreds of other businesses in exactly the same predicament you find yourself in now. We’ll help make sure you get set up with the right type of account for your needs.
On top of that, we aim to cut a lot of the red tape and get new merchant accounts open and operating for our clients as quickly as possible. In some cases, it’s possible for a new US collection agency to have an account open and filing transactions within 24 hours of your application going through. So drop us a line, let us know about your needs and we’ll find a solution that works for you ASAP.