Buzz In Business

A credit card processing company based out of Troy, MI, North American Bancard has grown significantly over the past couple of years. They have topped off the tremendous growth with the acquisition of two companies this spring.

The company handles many different types of merchant accounts. From wireless merchant accounts to setting up payment gateways for your website, they are flexible and customer focused. You can look at the North American Bancard Blog if you want to see the other services that they offer. The blog also connects to the corporate website, so if the articles peak your interest, then you can click right over to the actual products.

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Setting your business up to accept credit cards is a great way to reach out to new customers and encourage your existing customers to spend more. Nowadays, most businesses that process credit/debit cards do so via a merchant account. Merchant accounts essentially serve as a credit/debit card processing agreement between a business, a merchant bank and/or a third-party processor.

The following are a couple of tips that both current and prospective merchant account users can benefit from:

Buy Non-Proprietary Hardware

Credit card payments are processed via a POS terminal when customer credit cards are either swiped or manually keyed-in. With so many POS terminals available on the market, it is often times hard to choose between them. When looking at terminal you want to weigh it’s accessibility, flexibility, operating speed, cost, functionality and reliability. You’ll also want to consider whether or not a terminal is non-propriety. Non-Proprietary essentially means that the terminal’s hardware and software are independent of each and thus can be bought separately. Non-Proprietary terminals can pretty much be reprogrammed by any processor, making them a much more open and accommodating option than the alternative- a proprietary system. With a proprietary POS, terminal hardware and software are packaged together, sold, and supported all by the same company. This makes them very vendor specific and severely limits the options that are available to the user. In my opinion you should never buy proprietary hardware or hardware that you can’t take with you to another processor. Read the rest of this entry »

After Greece, Now it is Hungary’s economy that is in trouble. There has been a fear in the market that Hungary is facing a debt crisis and hence its currency has devalued considerably against euro. According to spokesman of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, the earlier government of Hungary falsified the data. Apparently, Hungary’s currency, the Forint, has devalued by 5.6% against the Euro. Read the rest of this entry »

JP Morgan has been fined a record 48.2 million dollars because it risked client money even though no client money was actually lost. The fine is imposed by Financial Services Authority (FSA). JP Morgan’s by lumping the money of its clients with its own money for seven years endangered the wealth of its clients.

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Timothy Geithner, US treasury secretary, made it very clear to the world that US consumers alone cannot support the world economy. He made this statement during his visit to Berlin. While in Berlin, he held talks with German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

 Greece, Portugal and Spain have seen a massive increase in their borrowing costs. Also other EU members have become cautious after seeing the condition of countries like Greece. Germany despite being Europe’s biggest economy is also following suit.

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The EU commissioner of Economic Affairs Olli Rehn said that the recession in Greece is much greater than expected. According to many, recession in Greece in the year 2010 will be 4% of GDP while in 2011 it will come down to 2.6% of the GDP. The commissioner mentioned that the recession be higher since Greece requires additional reforms worth 2.5% of GDP during the first 2 years of financial adjustment. It is expected that by 2012 end, the Greek economy will start to improve.

Olli Rehn also praised the EU and IMF program and stated that the program will help Greece to stabilize its economy.

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