Visa may publish a list of registered ISO’s

The Green Sheet reported this morning that that Visa may be planning to list the ISO’s that are legally registered with them. They also may be starting to crack down on ISO’s that are not operating strictly according to Visa regulations.

I think that this could be a great step in cleaning out many of the bad areas of the processing industry. There are thousands of website selling merchant account services, and from my experience looking at them, I would venture to say that more than half are not complying to Visa’s ISO regulations.

This could also provide another good tool for businesses looking to accept credit cards, if it is made readily available to the public. A person could make sure the company they are planning on processing with is actually a legally registered with Visa. This wouldn’t provide any background to whether the company was providing a quality service, but it would eliminate any doubt as to their legal affiliation.

However, Visa publishing registered ISO’s could have a negative affect on independent sales agents, as many of these sites are not compliant with current regulations, but are barely non-compliant. One current regulation states that sales agents must use the exact name of the ISO that they provide services through as their own DBA. Most of these non-compliant sites could be easily fixed to properly comply to Visa regulations, but Visa is extremely picky when inspecting websites for compliance. Something that seems so simple is actually a very complicated, bureaucratic mess, when you get down to it.

The other thought that worries me is that the only affect this may bring about, is to tighten the regulations on ISO’s that are compliant while ignoring companies that aren’t registered. (Like an anti-gun control argument, “ban guns, and the criminals are the only ones left with them”.) Currently, if you are a registered ISO you are under the microscope at least once per year, but if you aren’t legally registered, Visa and MasterCard really don’t care. There’s just too many websites operating illegally for anyone in Visa to take interest. In fact, I’ve been told first hand that it’s not policy to police non-registered websites on the internet, but only the ones that are registered. They would have to drastically change this policy before anything productive ever came from listing registered ISOs.

In response to this, I created a website listing registered ISOs that I have been able to identify.