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The ETA's Transact: a must for
serious payment professionals
On top of this, an ongoing trend towards consolidation
of merchant processors exists, as evidenced by the recent
acquisition of Jetpay by NCR and Cayan by TSYS, and the
recently announced merger of TSYS and Global Payments.
We can expect further mergers acquisitions this year,
which makes it exciting for the ETA member companies.
Varied educational tracks
One reason to attend Transact each year is the profusion of
educational tracks. Here are some examples:
• The Risk, Fraud, and Security Track covered next-
By Brandes Elitch generation underwriting, chargeback management,
CrossCheck Inc. risks in e-commerce, compliance and security
challenges, downside legal risks associated with
urely everyone who reads The Green Sheet boarding and maintaining merchants, identity
knows of the existence and importance of the verification, machine learning, and artificial
Electronic Transactions Association. If not, you intelligence.
S should. The ETA was founded in 1996 to pro- • The 22nd Century Payments Track covered mobile
vide a foundation and forum for people who work in the payments, Payment Card Industry security
bankcard acquiring industry. Aside from regional associa- standards, blockchain, faster payments, digital
tions (such as the Midwest Acquirers, Northeast Acquirers smart-data solutions, and mergers and acquisitions,
,Southeastern Acquirers and Western States Acquirers ) it a very hot topic.
is the primary voice for its members. • The Integrated Payments Track covered surcharging
and cash discounting, open source innovation,
The ETA has over 5,000 members from 30 countries. The working with independent software vendors,
annual conference, Transact, is typically held in April outsourcing, and other business-to-business
at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. solutions.
This year, more than 4,000 attendees and 200 exhibitors
attended the tradeshow. As Ed Sullivan might have said, it • The Payment Facilitator Track covered the important
was a "really big show!" things to know if you want to be a payment
facilitator (payfac), including card network rules
Spreading the acquiring action and regulations, legal and regulatory actions, the
business risk aspect, and global commerce.
The U.S. payments business will collect approximately $90
billion in fees this year, according to Bloomberg, and a large • The SMB Summit addressed how to provide
part of that is the fees merchants pay for their banking and meaningful consulting to small to midsize businesses
credit card processing. Yes, most merchants typically use (SMBs), how they will be affected by digital payments,
their local credit line bank for their concentration account and how to find and provide additional value-added
and for cash management services. However, they are services.
most likely to use a merchant processor or ISO, not the • ETA Law School covered subjects such as maintaining
local bank, for their credit card processing. reserves, Federal Trade Commission oversight, class
action developments, surcharging laws, and issues
This is not to say that banks don't want to get into this around how to classify and underwrite new accounts.
space, but most of the 4,600 commercial banks in the
United States are local banks without this capability. Hot topics in 2019
This is probably why two of the three major bank core
processors, Fiserv and FIS, have recently bought merchant People asked me what the hot topics were this year, and I
processing companies. They see this as a way to integrate would suggest there were two: calling on SMBs, and being
merchant processing with their core processing, basically a payfac. Until fairly recently, really the advent of Square
providing the entire general ledger accounts system for and Amazon, if you were a merchant, you had to have
the client bank, so now even community banks can be your own merchant account. If your volume was too small
acquirers. to justify this, you could not just "borrow" someone else's
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