Why Merchant Services Companies are Requesting Site Inspection to Be Completed?

by Rami Levi

Personally I have been in the merchant services industry for about 3 years. Although it is not a lot of time I was able to learn a lot about the industry, mostly because I started on my own, from scratch, and studied every inch of that industry, reading blogs like this daily for the first 2 years. When I first started site inspection for a merchant account was pretty rare. As I started working with high risk merchant accounts banks began requesting more and more for this procedure to be done.

Although site inspection seems like an old technique of trying to prevent fraud, and may sound out dated to some people, it works better than almost any technology available for preventing fraud. As identity theft has become a main concern not only for people but also for merchant account providers, acquiring banks, merchant services companies are much more careful then they used to. Taking a closer look at each account in order to try and detect the fraudulent applications that are being submitted by scammers daily.

So you have applied for an account, and now the sales representative is advising you that someone will contact you in order to schedule an appointment for the site inspection. You are skeptical at first and not sure why they would send someone out there. That is understandable considering we are in 2014 and almost everything is digital now, not to mention almost any kind of information about a person is available throughout the world wide web.

Due to increased credit card fraud in the merchant services industry, merchant account providers do their best to prevent this kind of leaks, and certain accounts have to go through this procedure. Now the question is what kind of accounts?

While some providers may request a site inspection done for every single account, other providers may only request site inspection on certain clients, the ones that involve more risk and are a bit more speculative. After all site inspection is an upfront cost for the merchant account providers and they would like to save it when possible. These kinds of accounts may be high risk industries, such as electronic cigarettes, certain e-commerce sites, collection agencies, travel agencies, online technical support and membership clubs. Also, people with bad or no credit may be subjected to that and businesses that are unverifiable are also on the list.

So as you can see there are a variety of reasons as to why your merchant account provider may request a site inspection. If you are an honest merchant with a legit business there is no reason for you to worry and actually you should be happy because this means that you are dealing with a legit merchant account provider. I hope I was able to relief some stress for those of you that were unsure and skeptical of the process.