Clouds and Subscription: Impact on Your Business Model

We all know the cloud has become one of the greatest disruptors in our business world today, with large enterprise technology companies reporting substantial profit increases driven by cloud operations, and smaller businesses feeling the impact of cloud computing on everything from supply chain management to pricing and sales models.  Business models, hardware sales, and workflows are all shifting considerably to the point where many existing rules of the tech business are no longer relevant. The trend is most noticeable in the shift in tech business models away from hardware and proprietary software sales models, and toward subscription-based revenue models, where users pay for the right to use technology, but don’t ever actually own it.

Use Sage 100 level 3 credit card processing when accepting credit card payments to significantly reduce processing fees.

It's easy to accept electronic payments, it's more challenging to reduce fees.  Our team at APS works diligently to get you the lowest credit card processing rates. We offer integrated Sage 100 Level 3 credit card processing in addition to our other level 3 ERP integrations. Our Sage 100 PCI-compliant security solutions feature point-to-point encryption (P2PE), tokenization, and our APSPAYS Vault, eliminating card data that typically would be stored on a local server. 

We also walk our merchants through the PCI Compliance Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), eliminating the Non-PCI Compliance Fee most merchants pay every month. 

 7 Growing Credit Card Processing Trends Transforming the Payments Industry 

1. In-store mobile payments are expected to overtake credit cards and grow from $75 billion to $503 billion in 2020
2. The top mobile wallets used at small and medium businesses are Apple Pay (16.6%), Google Wallet (516.0%), Android Pay (%11.3%), and Samsung Pay (8.2%).
3. The top 3 payment methods of online shoppers are credit cards (42%), electronic payment (39%), and debit cards (28%).
4. There will be 27.7 million mPOS devices in circulation in the U.S. by 2021, an increase from 3.2. million in 2014.
5. Over the next 5 years, blockchain technology is expected to reduce the costs of accounting reconciliation by 70% and compliance costs by 30-50%.
6. Enhanced customer experience is the future of payments, as more than 60% of Millennial and Gen Z consumers are willing to share their bank account credentials with third parties.
7. Biometric authentication such as fingerprint ID and facial recognition will be used in more than 18 billion transactions by 2021.

Source:  http://paymentsjournal.com/7-trends-for-the-future-of-payment-processing/.

Our Sage 100 credit card processing integrations team works diligently to help keep our merchants’ data safe. For Sage 100 merchant processors, this means we need to ensure all our customers are following the PCI-DSS Regulations. On June 30^th 2018, TLS 1.0, SSL V3 will no longer be a PCI approved method of running transactions. To maintain PCI Compliance, payment processors and gateway providers are removing security certificates, which will disable older versions of Sage 100 legacy software using this legacy encryption method. This means processing this way will not be considered PCI Compliant, and all transactions will stop working eventually.

According to posts on the internet and information gleaned from our Channel Partner Network it would appear that on May 2^nd, 2018 Sage 100 versions 4.5 and prior, formerly MAS 90 and MAS 200, could no longer process credit cards through Paya, formerly, Sage Payment Solutions.  Most companies on these versions of Sage 100 mentioned they had a processing blackout for over 24 hours, some even longer.  It is currently unclear whether the companies using these versions have abruptly been forced to stop processing or whether they will be forced to stop processing as of June 30, 2018 the last day the card brands will allow transactions to flow on any TLS lower than TLS 1.2.   

There are a few main types of credit card processing rates with their own advantages and disadvantages. There are flat rates, tiered pricing rates, interchange plus rates, Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 processing rates. 

Read this article before switching merchant service providers.

Switching merchant services providers may seem like a hassle if you are switching to save money it’s worth it and your new provider should make it as painless as possible.  However, there a few important items to consider when making the switch.  Credit card processing is a commodity, companies usually switch for a few main reasons; to get better rates, enhanced integration, superior support and/or to ensure PCI compliance. 

New research from Kaspersky Lab shows that the average cost to small-to-medium sizes businesses in the United States and Canada has reached record highs.

The company found that data breaches now exceed $140,000 for SMBs (up 36% from 2017). Most of the cost comes from the need to quickly upgrade infrastructure and software, but there are hefty fines if the data that was compromised included credit card data. For enterprise companies, the costs are even greater, with the average data breach cost being $1.75 million on average.

Sage 100 users now have the ability to get invoices paid almost as fast as their invoices are printed. It’s like adding a 24 hour a day collection agent to your staff. Customers demand convenience especially when it comes to paying for your products and services.  ClickToPay is designed to help companies get paid faster for the products and services they offer.  ClickToPay is a simple and secure credit card processing payment feature enabling your customers to pay invoices with the click of a button.  Invoices are paid and processed online, anytime.  It is super easy to set up in Sage 100 and also easy for your customers to use.  Sage 100 users can rest assured that this automated process is PCI compliant and your customers information is secure. 

If you are a Sage 100 end user, you’ve probably learned that card present transactions aren’t the easiest payments to process through your ERP. For years, USB Swipers have been the only way to process transactions in a card present environment, unless you want to purchase a full-scale point of sale, which can be very costly in the ERP space. USB Swipers do not have the ability to process transactions using the EMV-embedded chips, which have been a standard since 2016 in the USA.