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Education

sales organization, deal with MLSs? Salaried employees to the bottom line for savings, and I hope for the sanity
and independent contractors certainly are different ‒ and of their sales organizations, cuts are thoughtfully planned
have unique needs. out.

I have also heard the following questions also being asked: Yes, during times of mergers, ISO, MLSs and merchants
• Will my sales office Schedule A be amended? typically suffer from the disruption caused by two
organizations when different business structures,
• Who will now be handling risk? practices and cultures combine. It takes much time and
• My current company is great with risk, and they energy to combine cultures, call centers and tech support
handle merchants in a professional manner, but personnel. The representatives one has relied on to solve
what about the new company? daily issues may be gone or reassigned. Even actions taken
• Will risk tighten up, or will certain verticals fall with the best intentions on the part of the merging entities
may still have harsh fallout.
out of favor?
• How will the boarding process change? I welcome comments from anyone reading this article.
• Currently we have an online tool for boarding Please send comments to either my email given in the bio
merchants, but will we have to be trained on a below, or address them on the MLS Forum. The moniker I
new system? use there is Talk to Steve.
• If we have to use a new system, what will happen Steven Feldshuh, President of Merchants' Choice Payment Solutions
to all the old data? East, has 18 years' experience in sales and ISO development. Directly
prior to joining MCPSE in 2012, he was President of Payment Partners.
• Our current sponsoring bank actually funds on In his current position, Steven devotes the bulk of his time to assisting
Saturday, will the new sponsoring bank be able to
do the same? agents in building their portfolios. Contact him by email at stevenf@
mcpseast.com or by phone at 212-392-9202.
And what happens to the salaried sales folks if the new
company works more with an ISO model? We became
ISAs because we wanted to control as much of our own SnapShot of Up Coming Events
destiny as possible. As such, we work when we want to
work. We price merchants the way we choose to price
them. We call on the merchant verticals we choose to call
on. We can work with multiple programs and have access
to many processors, or ISOs. As a salaried salesperson,
your choices are much more limited, and you have much
stricter rules to abide by. The question is what is the
preference of the acquiring company? Not all companies
prefer the ISO/MLS business model. April 9-11, 2018

Unintended fallout Grand Hyatt Washington 1000 H St NW
Washington, DC
During the last few weeks, there have been many comments https://www.americanbanker.com/conference/
on the subject of the Vantiv/Worldpay merger, and many power-of-prepaid-2018
of the questions I just listed came up. I also pulled ideas
from several members of the MLS Forum, including Nerd
Crow, dub16, clearent, CardPlayer (identified by their
forum handles) and others, and I want to thank them for
the intelligent discussions taking place. To participate in
these and other discussions of interest to ISOs and MLSs,
go to the Forums tab at The Green Sheet's home page, www.
greensheet.com, and follow the instructions to join the MLS
Forum.

I witnessed a horrific takeover back in the early 2000s
when Bank of America took over National Processing April 17-19, 2018
Co. In the course of a very short period, Bank of America Mandalay Bay Las Vegas, NV
eliminated most of NPC's customer service department. http://www.electran.org/events/etatransact18/
Hold times went from a few minutes to 1 hour or more.
Tech support fell apart. My understanding here is that the
combined entity of Vantiv and Worldpay, also will look

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