Many businesses are reluctant to accept American Express cards due to Amex’s reputation of making it too easy for cardholders to dispute charges.
Merchants around the world made their voices heard and Amex has finally made some changes to their dispute policies that will enable simpler dispute management and fewer chargebacks.
In fact, Merchants saw a reduction of approximately 17% in disputes and have saved over $21MM in chargebacks during the first 3 months after all of the disputes policy enhancements made by American Express in 2016 went into effect.
Here are some very welcomed changes:
Redispute Limitation
The number of times a dispute can be raised on the same charge will be limited to two in most cases.
Chargeback Timeframe Reduction
Now, in most cases, you may see significantly fewer Chargebacks 120 days after the Transaction date.
Fewer Low‑Dollar‑Amount Chargebacks
Amex reduced the number of low‑dollar chargebacks you see.
No More Missing- Signature Chargebacks
You will no longer see chargebacks for missing signature on Card Member fraud claims, but Amex still officially requires that you capture signature.
For a full brochure of the new Amex policies please click HERE.
DirectDonate is a Banquest donate-by-phone vendor providing non-profits and for-profit organizations with an easy and affordable phone based donation system. By providing a phone number in your advertisements or other literature, your organization can capture the moment and increase the chance of a donation.
If you have a unique requirement such as a survey or raffle, we can customize the system to ask the necessary questions, capture the results and provide them to you to be analyzed in further detail.
For the hotline:
We assign a telephone number to your organization and you can either advertise that number or if you have your own “main” number you can configure your phone system to forward donation calls to the assigned number.
The callers are greeted by a customized greeting, and from there – the caller follows the process to make the donation, or choose the raffle tickets they want to purchase.
The system gathers the credit card information and using the Banquest gateway – processes the transaction in real time.
Best of all, the system is basically FREE. After a one time setup fee ($399) there are no fees, unless a donation is made through the phone system.
Get your own DirectDonate phone number today and start increasing your bottom line. For more info or to get started please email DirectDonate@Banquest.com or call us at 732-323-8300.
Apple announced on Monday that it is launching a money-transfer service that could challenge PayPal, Chase QuickPay and other competitors, letting iPhone and iPad users send money digitally to each other via a text.
The new feature will appear automatically inside Apple Text Messages when Apple launches the new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 11.
Apple also announced its own digital debit card — called Apple Pay Cash — that lets people take the money they receive via the new money-transfer service and use it to make Apple Pay purchases online or in physical stores that accept tap-and-pay transactions.
The new Apple money-transfer service will be limited to users of iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches.
These services have typically been money losers for the new entrants in the space, but are seen as the gateway to the next generation of payment and personal finance services that could upend traditional consumer banking relationships. They are used for everything from splitting dinner bills to paying rent.
So does Apple want to be a bank? Not now, but maybe someday.
For now, the new Apple Pay Cash card could have a more direct impact on a current Apple business: Apple Pay. Industry insiders believe the virtual debit card will be a way to introduce Apple Pay to new users, perhaps to a younger consumers that don’t already have their own traditional credit or debit cards.
That, in turn, could boost usage of the Apple Pay service, which has been underwhelming in the nearly three years since it launched.
Of course, if you want to accept Apple Pay in your business be sure to drop us a line at support@banquest.com.
It’s an awkward situation when you have to inform a customer their card has been declined. The customer will usually insist it must be some mistake on your end, but after several attempts at trying, you have to tell them you believe their card is the problem.
Address Verification System (AVS) is a fraud-prevention measure implemented on card-not-present transactions like e-commerce and phone orders. AVS works by entering the cardholders billing address and zip code during the transaction. When a transaction gets declined due to an AVS mismatch it can be particularly tricky.
Here are a few scenarios that trigger an AVS decline and how to rectify them.
AVS Mismatch No. 1: A customer is making a purchase, but there’s an AVS mismatch between the address or ZIP code. The transaction is declined in your payment gateway, but the customer notices the purchase in his pending transactions. The business owner believes the transaction didn’t go through, but the customer’s bank says it did.
Important to note: While the issuing banks benefit from fraud-prevention measures like AVS, they’ll still approve transactions even when AVS mismatches occur. It is the business owner himself that sets the settings to decline transactions based on AVS mismatch.
In essence, the transaction is approved by the issuing bank but is declined by the business owners payment system.
Businesses have three options in this scenario:
Try again in case information was entered incorrectly.
Override the system to approve the transaction.
Cancel the transaction.
It’s best to cancel the transaction if you don’t know the customer to avoid a potentially fraudulent transaction. If you know and trust the customer, you’re welcome to override the system, but doing so will incur a higher transaction rate that accounts for risk. If you rerun the transaction and it continues to fail, it will create more pending transactions on the customer’s credit card statement and more declines on your end, simply exacerbating the problem (though the mixup will be resolved when you settle the day’s transactions. Once settled, the pending charges usually clear within 24 hours.)
AVS Mismatch No. 2: A customer provides a true billing address, but an AVS decline occurs. The cardholder swears the information was updated with the issuing bank, but there are two reasons the bank records still might not match the address provided.
P.O. Boxes
If the customer provides a P.O. Box, a mismatch can occur if the bank does not commit to the same recording practices as the Merchant Account Provider. It’s considered a best practice to truncate the “P.O. Box” and simply verify the numbers provided. But not all banks do that, which results in mismatches of “123” and “POB,” for instance.
The cardholder can resolve this problem by calling the issuing bank and informing it that the P.O. Box is entered incorrectly for verification purposes.
Mailing Address Update
Updating your mailing address is top of mind after a move, but that’s not enough to avoid an AVS decline. Updating a mailing address will ensure credit card statements reach the new home, but that’s it; the billing information for the card isn’t automatically changed.
The cardholder simply needs to contact the card’s issuing bank, request an update to the billing address and move forward with the payment.
In summation, here’s a quick cheat sheet for dealing with AVS declines on the fly:
If you know the customer, reduce the hassle and continue with the payment.
If you don’t know the customer, consider retrying if you potentially entered the information incorrectly over the phone. For e-commerce transactions, consider canceling the transaction entirely to prevent fraud.
Explain to the customer that the transaction isn’t actually approved, despite what the bank might be saying.
If a customer swears up and down that the information is correct, inform the customer of the P.O. Box issue if applicable. If that isn’t the issue, ask whether the customer recently updated the billing address.
