What is Interchange Plus?
Understand Interchange plus pricing model, pros and cons which can help you take an informed decision for your business.
5 mins
Whether you have an existing business or starting a new one, one of the important must-do tasks is to find the right solution provider for your payments and business banking needs. There are several solution providers in the market which can lead to confusion and decision exhaustion when choosing the right one for your business needs. Although every business is unique and every business owner has varying needs around business banking and payments, the below-given set of key points can act as the guiding map for business owners to arrive at this decision.
1. Market Reputation: Always prefer to select solution providers which have a good market reputation. Banking and payments involve managing your confidential business financial data which needs to be managed in a compliant and risk-free manner protecting against fraudsters and various cybercrimes. E.g., ensuring the provider is giving FDIC insurance as well as PCI DSS-compliant solutions. Therefore, it is safe to go with a solution provider with good brand awareness and highly positive customer reviews.
2. Information Transparency: Most of the solution providers out there in the market have complex pricing and billing, as well as multiple hidden charges which can have an impact on your business bottom line. Prefer to choose a solution provider who has a focus on maintaining transparency with simple pricing, billing, and no hidden charge policy. Such a provider will go for flat per-transaction pricing at around 2.9% + 30 cents versus others following an interchange++ model.
3. Integrated Offering: Using multiple solution providers for every different business need can make your ecosystem complex and lead to operational challenges with unnecessary administrative overhead. Prefer to use a solution provider that single-handedly can meet all or most of your business needs around payments and banking through an integrated offering set, even if it requires paying a little premium on the pricing as compared to the alternatives.
4. Onboarding Workflow: A lot of legacy solution providers have complex onboarding and implementation workflows. They are not digital-first, highly manual intensive, and paper-based leading to delays in going live with the solution. It is advisable to select a solution provider which is digital-first with instant onboarding through paperless methods and automated implementation workflows.
5. Niche Focus: It is advisable to go with a solution provider that has a niche customer focus (e.g., payments and banking for only small businesses). Such a solution provider will be able to identify all your business-specific pain points and efficiently resolve them as compared to solution providers with a broader customer focus.
Otterz is a business banking and payments solution provider with a niche focus on small businesses in the USA. It is a digital-first solution with instant onboarding and an intuitive user experience. The integrated offering around banking and payments is fully secured and compliant while it maintains transparency through simple pricing and billing methods to ensure small business owners can focus on their business and customers.
