An unfortunate part of running a business is that you occasionally run into competitors or payment method gateways that are less-than ethical when it comes to billing. Sometimes they might take a ridiculously high cut when it comes to performing billing processes, while others might overcharge your clients for a particular services, as well. This will all come back to affect your business negatively—whether you are directly dealing with or not.

Here is why you should make some extra effort to focus on ethical credit card processing.

You don’t need fake credit card processing

Nothing looks worse on your business record than a number of fake credit card processing feeds. Even if you can somehow point them back to your payment facilitator or the merchant account service, it still leaves a bad mark on your business—especially if the cost is passed on to your customer. If you notice some charges that don’t seem to add up with agreement you entered into when you signed up for your account, then you want to immediately address these issues so you can find a better service for payments.

PCI compliance

Do you know if you are PCI compliant? If you aren’t sure, this can be something that ends up costing you money.The best merchant account won’t charge you extra if you are not PCI compliant—they will tell you upfront that this is something you need to make a priority as a business and they won’t charge you a fee without telling you why. This is why partnering with an ethical credit card processor can be so necessary to the development of your business and how you approach working with payments.

EMV non-compliance

If your business has been slow to upgrade your machines to the newest card terminals, that’s another area where your merchant account can end up charging you. There might be a number of reasons you haven’t upgraded yet, including that you can’t afford to update your entire payment processing system or that your tech isn’t updated enough to handle it. Instead of being penalized for this, that money should be able to go toward upgrading your systems so you can take chip cards and offer your clients better security.

Additional tax-reporting fees

Your credit card processor has to release your tax information to the IRS as a legal requirement. However, they shouldn’t charge you an added fee for doing so. It should be baked into the cost of using them as a provider. Part of the reason so many merchant accounts get away with this is because it looks like a legitimate fee—you might not think twice about whether or not it should be charged. When this is the case, you should open a dispute or look to switching over to a more reputable credit card processing company.

In conclusion

When you run an ethical business, it seems only fair that the merchant account you use follow the same set of morals. Not only does this save you costs, but it also helps you to feel good about the company you are working with when it comes to payments.