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Revelations - Xbiz Summer Forum & Billing

As the Xbiz Summer Forum wrapped up last week I enjoyed the opportunity to moderate the panel focused on Visa regulations, good business practices, and the card associations’ rules, past, present and future. My panelists included card processing authorities Cathy Beardsley of Segpay/CommerceGate/DHD, Mitch Farber of Netbilling, Steve Bryson of OrbitalPay, Dennis DelaRosa of OnlineIPS.net, and Doug Wickes of CCBill.

Our discussions centered on recent new VISA rule enforcement emphasis, guidance on compliance issues, and understanding the regulations faced by merchants every day. Among others, attendee Daniel Hogue, camworld.com CEO, contributed some incisive questions eliciting detailed answers to specific compliance requirements across programs and sites. The depths of the combined panelists’ knowledge was certainly tested here. This Xbiz offering was not your typical vanilla tradeshow billing seminar.

Topics covered included internal and external cross sale limits and exclusions, affects on merchant account holders versus those using third party processors, differences between Visa and MasterCard on all topics, content guidelines and monitoring, history and significance of the Visa regions, descriptors, scrubbing, intentional and unintentional questionable billing practices, common merchant mistakes, and suspicious activity and freezing of funds. The bottom line was a mostly positive future outlook from a particularly well informed group delivering the real goods without hedging.

A post-Visa adult world was also discussed and the panelists unanimously agreed that VISA will not leave the space, but compliance enforcement, fraud prevention and vigorous monitoring of merchant relationships and activities would all continue to intensify to the benefit of cardholders.

I especially enjoyed the moderation, as Webbilling does not provide merchant accounts or process credit cards and therefore is not affected by card association rules; Webbilling provides a non-card payment platform for Europe to pair with and augment credit card processing for extra revenue from the same traffic. With knowledge of processing but no dog in the show, my questions generated a spirited hour of discussion and great attendee participation. For information and introductions to panelists and information on the Webbilling EU non-card payment solutions, write Marketing@Webbilling.com NOW, and watch for more straightforward relevant panels at future Xbiz events.

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