More problems for iBill?

Mister X · 07-11-2003, 05:15 PM

So the latest news is that Epoch is going to drop any Sponsored Merchant that also processes with iBill. Apparently because 2 big companies that process with them are out of compliance with visa regs in their processing with iBill.

In fact it sounds like they want to discourage cascading processors altogether.

The argument seems to be that because Visa is shifting from monitoring compliance on a per IPSP basis they are going to start monitoring each sponsored merchant based upon all his processing. Which apparently means that a Sponsored Merchant going out of compliance at one IPSP can affect the other IPSPs own compliance.

Seems like it could be very bad news for iBill.

Kris · 07-11-2003, 05:21 PM

it's bad for iBill b/c evidently their scrubbing isn't up to par. if you have an account at ccbill, ibill, and epoch, and your ibill account goes over the 1%, you're flagged -- on all accounts. epoch's goal, and i'm going to assume all processors, is to have as few flagged accounts as possible, keeping the heat down.

NetRodent · 07-11-2003, 07:10 PM

It could be bad news for iBill or bad news for Epoch, depending on how you spin it. Epoch has the most aggressive "selling tools" of any of the processors and in light of the new rules they're having to scale back some of their offerings across the board. iBill doesn't appear to have to make those sorts of wholesale changes to their business (atleast according to the iBill conference all earlier today).

Mister X · 07-12-2003, 09:31 PM

Sounds like the battle of the conference calls, lolol.

Seems like it might come down to who provides the better service. If that's the case then iBill has had it cuz there is no way that Epoch could have worse customer service than iBill. We found out on Thursday that Visa has been unavailable on our sites for some unknown period of time. Probably since sometime last month. So of course a call was made to our account rep at iBill raising nine kinds of hell. He swore up and down that it would be back up in 30 minutes. As of now (saturday night) still no damn Visa. The site hasn't had any compliance probs and it wasn't dropped by Visa. he admitted it was some sort of foul up. But that certainly didn't make them work any harder to fix it.

A friend of mine recently spent all the cash necessary to get his US LLC and move from iBill Europe to the US operation so that he could keep accepting Visa. He has 2 sites. The first site there were no problems other than a pretty slow turnaround time which meant he didn't have Visa for a couple of weeks. The second site still doesn't have Visa on it after 5 weeks. He has stuck with iBill from the beginning because of the rebills but he is almost certainly going to switch to another processor and let the rebills stay with iBill but not send any new signups through them. His problem with iBill is compounded by the fact that he had a fairly successful revshare running and when iBill switched things over they neglected to do anything about transferring that and didn't even bother to activate the revshare for the new account. When he asked if his revsharers were getting credit for signups they were sending the answer was "I don't know".

The thing that made the biggest impression between iBill and CCBill is that the CCBill account rep provided a cell phone number in case she wasn't reachable in the office. The iBill account rep sometimes takes 3 or 4 days to reply to voicemail or email and answers his phone at iBill maybe one time in 20 calls.

Bestat · 07-14-2003, 12:10 PM

I do not process with Epoch, but if I did I would not want them telling me who I could or could not process with. Not sure they can do that if it was not in the original agreement people signed when they set up. Lot of changes coming for sure.