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Annual PCI Compliance Fee?

(2 posts)

  1. sBiz101

    member
    Joined: Oct '09
    Posts: 44

    Reputation:83
     

    I just got my latest merchant account statement from United Bank Card (UBC), and once again there's an additional mysterious fee on my @#$% statement. I'm really getting fed up with these guys and considering switching back to Paypal Pro (what initially held me back was the monthly fee).

    Anyways, the latest is an annual $89.95 "pci compliance fee" that is supposed to cover me for any kind of credit card fraud liability - basically so I wouldn't have to pay "hundreds of dollars" in PCI compliance fees. It also includes some kind of "secure scan" feature on ubcsecure.com. The irony is that the website doesn't even work, just gives a "server application unavailable" error message in large red letters (the UBC rep said they're updating it).

    Here's my real beef with this compliance fee though - I'm already paying Authorize.net $20/ month to use their CMI payment system, which effectively has them storing credit card data for PCI compliance purposes. So I'm not even handling or storing credit card data - in other words, I can't possibly ever be PCI un-compliant! So this is basically a double billing.

    Anyone have a good merchant account provider recommendation?

    Posted 1 year ago #


  2. Posted 1 year ago

  3. Anonymous



    The PCI compliance fee is being implemented industry wide by banks and merchant account providers to pay for increased costs involved with new PCI compliance measures that help crack down on credit card fraud. In the long haul, this is a good thing for the industry and should help keep fees in check.

    It doesn't matter if you have Authorize.net's CIM (Customer Information Management) system installed - that merely protects you from getting nailed with $5,000 and up fees by the PCI compliance people (since Authorize.net stores the data, they will get hit instead if there's an issue).

    The reason your merchant account provider is still charging you the annual compliance fee is because you are still liable, even with CIM, since you accept credit card numbers on your website. You're responsible for them until they arrive at authorize.net. In other words, you need to have an SSL cert and a secure and stable shopping cart (and the shopping cart shouldn't store the credit card data - only pass it on) to be compliant.

    Posted 1 year ago #

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