Freedom and flexibility in CNP processing

PaymentCloud Inc. specializes in assisting merchants who are often labeled as high risk by bank underwriters because they accept card-not-present (CNP) transactions. Most ISOs work with conventional banks that focus their underwriting on card-present retail transactions. Any business that doesn't conform to the conventional card-present acceptance model can be considered high risk.

PaymentCloud Inc. maintains an in-house underwriting department that helps increase approvals for hard to place customers. It prides itself on having a 98 percent approval rate, shortened application times, account activation within two to six days, and no application or set-up fees.

One team, one dream

PaymentCloud Inc. was founded in 2016 by CEO Shawn Silver, who has grown the company into a major player in the digital ISO space. The company accounts for 75 percent of all digital CNP transactions, according to Silver, who added that PaymentCloud's partnerships with Stripe, Square, Fattmerchant and Payment Depot are convincing signs of its success.

"We try to make things simple for merchants, to create a user experience behind a product or a process to their payment cloud that is geared toward the mail order/telephone order ecommerce space," Silver said. "We have a handful of really good banking relationships that specialize in expanded credit policies and have an appetite for this business, and we've built really healthy portfolios working with digital ISOs.

"I think that it's a testament that Stripe and Square are partnered with us. In this business today, people are seeing margin compression and trying to make up for it in volume. But that's a really hard game to play. In our business, we see really healthy margins."

Specialized underwriting

Typical PaymentCloud customers are ecommerce merchants who don't have a traditional brick-and-mortar retail facility but want to offer a more personalized online ordering experience with CNP processing.

PaymentCloudnoted that its unique, proprietary platform provides merchants analytics, reporting, and chargeback management, as well as plugin integrations for online shopping that integrate with ecommerce solutions such as USAePay, NMI and Authorized.net.

"We are always taking into consideration the hurdles that most merchants are going through," Silver said. "We have a customer success team that sets up the mobile accounts for merchants and reaches out to them to hold their hand through that setup and activation process. We make recommendations to customers on what we think would be a good fit for the business based upon what we've seen historically in that SIC code or around that business type. Not all businesses are the same, not all banks are the same and not all relationships are the same."

Strong controls, strong compliance

PaymentCloud provides the latest technology to ensure customers are EMV and PCI compliant. And the company's customer success team reaches out to help merchants navigate through PCI compliance requirements and provides instructions on who to call when a breach is detected. As customers' online shopping habits shift, it's important to have strong compliance controls in place to handle volume when there is an influx of business, Silver added.

Silver said PaymentCloud makes prioritized treating referral partners well. The company makes it convenient for ISOs and merchant level salespeople to make referrals and get paid, while also providing residual reports that contain detailed line items.

"Making sure agents are taken care of and able to focus on selling, what they do best, is what's most important," Silver said. "We have a full-time CFO and controller, and when you see the willingness to share all the data, information, the reporting and the functionality of it all, you know that somebody's there to help. I think it puts a lot of agents at ease, and yes, there's a lot of bad stories out there, but we take our agent distribution channel very seriously and we appreciate it tremendously. If it wasn't for our agent channel, PaymentCloud wouldn't be where it is today."

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