[VoiceOps] Recommendation for a merchant account for Telecom

[Denver Gingerich]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 05:01:38PM -0400, Oren Yehezkely via VoiceOps wrote:
> Can you recommend a merchant bank or broker who will work with the telecom
> industry?
> I am sure that the problem is not for the giants of the industry but small
> telecom companies now have the negative label "VoIP".
> It does not really matter what you do exactly and how you provide services
> not even if you have years of clean record, the banking industry defines
> you as "VoIP" and it does not matter much what you say.

Yeah, we had a huge problem with this when we at JMP moved from ad hoc payments to a proper payment processor.  Stripe explicitly disallowed "phone services" (some have told me you may be able to get written approval for an exception, but I haven't heard of anyone who succeeded), and others we tried (like Bambora) told us after onboarding that actually they don't support new VoIP customers.  We had specifically tried Bambora because we saw they processed payments for VoIP.ms.  But they claimed that was grandfathered and they wouldn't do it again.

Anyway, we use Braintree now, which is just like any other processor from what we can tell.  It may be better in the sense that they vet you before letting you start accepting payments (vs. Stripe, which vets you after, and freezes your funds if their later vetting process finds they don't like you).  But otherwise they seem to have the same pricing, and happen to accept phone service providers as customers.

Frankly, we prefer other payment methods, since they have way less fraud than credit cards, but of course people like credit cards for various reasons.  I'm sure others here have tips on reducing fraud (especially if you let people dial international numbers) if that's a concern of yours.

If you meant something other than a payment processor, my apologies.  We didn't have issues getting a bank account, only a payment processor, which is I why I responded this way.

Denver
https://jmp.chat/