or over 20 years The Green Sheet, Inc. has provided timely coverage of the rapidly expanding and evolving payment processing marketplace.

In our continuing efforts to provide useful and actionable information for MLSs, we developed a joint venture-a monthly online survey-with Cynergy Data to find out directly from the source what MLSs want and need to succeed in this industry.

Your answers provide us with insight about the tools and information we provide. The Green Sheet wants to bring the right information to the right people in the right way!

We use a third-party survey management service to ensure the poll results are blind and that each participant responds only once. "You Tell Us" is posted each month on www.greensheet.com. The results of our first survey were announced last month (You Tell Us—May 2004 Survey Results, issue 04:06:02); we're announcing the results from June, below:

To track the demographics of our respondents we asked "Which of the following best describes your role – personally—within the payments processing industry?"

We asked whether a business partner's location made a difference; 63% of respondents said that all things being equal, they did not necessarily prefer to do business with someone local.

We asked, "What makes you first notice an acquirer or other product/service vendor?"

The Green Sheet is overwhelmingly the trade publication most often referenced for vendor leads and industry information.

Forty-four percent of our June respondents said they would like to see more profits in the industry. Some of the other issues they would like to see more of include:

We asked you to rank services in order of their importance. These services included marketing materials, online materials, online forms and tutorials, faster turn-around on merchant applications, less paperwork, funding solutions and equipment solutions.

The majority of respondents ranked faster turn-around times as the most important service and ranked funding solutions as the least important service.

Our last two questions concerned used and/or refurbished equipment. 31% of the respondents deployed between one to four used and/or refurbished terminals last month; however 29.9% deployed over 15.

The vendors you are using for these terminals are varied. The responses were fairly evenly divided among the manufacturers listed. The top four were:

1. Lipman
2. TASQ
3. Hypercom
4. VeriFone

We update the poll with new questions every month and the July 2004 survey is now live. Please visit GS Online and click on one of the "You Tell Us" link to respond. It takes less than five minutes to complete and responses are anonymous.

If you have questions you would like to see added to an upcoming poll, please send them to julie@greensheet.com .