Payment Trends Of March 2024! | Biz To Biz Podcast

You are now watching the Biz to Biz podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Scott Skiles of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. In today's podcast, we're going to be talking about payment trends for March 2024. It is the 28th of March already.

That's crazy.

Craziness.

Yeah, my birthday is coming up soon.

Nice. My dad's is on the 3rd.

Oh, we're Aries brothers.

There you go. I wonder if he knows that. I don't know.

Maybe. I don't know.

How you doing, man?

I'm doing okay. You know, another month passed by in 2024. We're in the middle of March Madness now.

Go Marquette!

So, you know, are people working on their brackets or I didn't feel one out this year. We're working at work.

I didn't feel one out this year.

Yeah, you got the men's bracket, the women's bracket.

Yeah, I don't pay much attention to the women's basketball.

Women's basketball is pretty exciting this year.

That's what you said. Yeah. It's not, never been my thing. No disrespect to the women, basketball, I mean, you know.

Go Iowa, Caitlin Clark and company.

Iowa.

And how's it going over there?

It's going.

Okay.

Taking one day at a time, man. So yeah, man, what you got going on this payment trends thing?

So, you know, a crazy story like popped up in the news yesterday about, which we don't have on the sheet, but Visa and MasterCard There's been an ongoing lawsuit for over a decade for swipe fees. Right. So for over a decade, this lawsuit's been going on and all of a sudden they announce there's this settlement agreement. I mean, the judge has to agree to it. But what's crazy about the settlement agreement is nobody's going to get any money back. So for the last 10 years, all these companies have been running around attorney companies, other companies trying to sign up all the merchants to give them their merchant number and sign up with them so they can help them get the money from this settlement agreement, right? Meanwhile, the entire time, um, tons of large businesses like Walmart already got paid, but all the small businesses and medium-sized businesses out there didn't see a cent.

What, what is the— what's the science behind that? Why?

I don't know. That's just like what happened. And then the settlement agreement, every— there was supposed to be money given out. They've been talking about giving this money out for the last 3, 4, 5 years, and companies sending out emails, sign up here. I mean, I tell people not to do that because you're just gonna— when they do have the settlement, you're gonna get an official notice from the court You're just going to put in your name, address, your federal tax ID number, a merchant number or merchant numbers that you're attached to, send it in electronically or through the mail, and you're going to get— if there's a check, you're going to get one. But now they changed the game on that. Now Visa and MasterCard are saying, well, instead of doing that, we're just going to lower some rates. And give people, you know, savings instead of giving them money. So it remains to be seen as to if the judge signs off on it, but that's basically what the lawyers agreed to. Actually, I think it's better. I don't think that they're really addressing it. They should force Visa and Mastercard.

What was the lawsuit? I mean, they're saying that fee What?

Oh, the interchange fees. Okay. So their fight, the whole fight is, oh, they're overcharging for interchange. But that doesn't— but, you know, interchange, that only helps people who are on interchange pass-through pricing. So if you're on a bundled pricing like through Stripe, Square, PayPal, QuickBooks, Shopify, etc., etc., etc. Doesn't affect you. You're not getting any money back. And if they lower the interchange fees, that's just more money in those companies' pockets, not in the merchant's pocket. Now, if you're a merchant and you're on interchange pass-through, which is what most of our merchants are on, yeah, then you're going to see some savings on interchange fees. But if you're on a bundled program, you know, you're not going to— so, yeah, you're, you're SOL is right. You're, you know, you're not going to get any money and those companies are going to pocket the money.

Sounds about right. I mean, doesn't surprise me.

To me, they should bring back small ticket interchange, which would save tons of small and medium-sized businesses money. And they should have— they agreed to some cap on interchange, which that's fine. That's not going to really affect much. But I think what they should do is they should say, oh well, if a business does less than, let's say, $25,000 a month, right, they should get like a 10 basis point discount. And the other thing I think that they should do, they should tell Visa and MasterCard that they gotta do away with, they gotta lower the dues and assessment fee, which they keep raising and raising and raising on merchants. We don't get one cent. People think like we get all this money from the credit card processing. We don't get that much 'cause all the interchange goes to the banks. All the dues and assessments and other fees go to Visa and MasterCard. Yeah, they should make them lower the dues and assessment fee, bring back small ticket interchange, and they should also, you know, Biden talks about all these junk fees. They should tell the credit card companies, and I don't wanna name names of big companies 'cause they'll get mad, but I don't care. Like one of them, one that's egregious is First Data. Has a lot of junk fees on their statement. And there's other companies that have tons of junk fees on their statement. You know, Heartland is one, Global's another, you know, and other companies have more simplified type statements. We stick with the companies who supply simplified statements so that there's not a ton of junk fees on there. You know, there's fees that have to be paid, but I think some of the fees are just, you know, junk fees and, most of the time, I would say 99% of them, we don't get a dime on, right? So we don't care if— whether they charge them or not. So it's better for the merchant. So, you know, that's what's going on with that lawsuit. It also had in the lawsuit that Visa was going to stipulate to more—

a more—

whatever, a better rule about like surcharging aka passing the fee to the customer. But that wasn't exactly spelled out as to how they were going to do it, accomplish it. But they were going to basically agree to something a little more, a little better than what they have now. And then that would probably stop some of these states from some of the laws that they put in. New York, New Jersey, California, and other states have looked at you know, laws against this surcharging thing, which makes no sense because you still have dual pricing where it enables businesses to offer a cash price and a credit price.

Right.

So they're just wasting time when they pass these surcharge laws because, you know, the workaround is dual pricing and nobody does surcharging. They just don't.

Right.

So it's just, you know, we'll see how this lawsuit plays out. I mean, A couple of organizations came out against it, convenience store organization, oh, we don't like it. But when you look at it, I did the math on it, like what the settlement amount was and how much, and if you divided it by the amount of businesses in the US, it came out to somewhere around $150 to $200 per business in the United States.

Well, that's why no one's getting the money, it's a drop in a bucket.

Right, so I mean, who cares about, that's no money. To get some basis points back, that would be good. But I also think they gotta, look at these other fees and drop them. But that's— we'll see what happens. The judge has to sign off on it, and hopefully the sooner the better. And I hope that they force Visa into something that allows the dual pricing and stop with all the games, playing the games. Just, just address the monkey in the room and the elephant, because the, the— what, how do they say that? Left the barn. The horse left the barn already.

Something like that.

Yeah, the horse ran out of the gate a long time ago, you know, 5, 6 years ago. COVID accelerated that.

The cat's out the bag.

Yeah, the cat's out of the bag, you know, with passing the fee. And they just need to— it just needs to be dealt with. So, you know, because the Supreme Court's dealt with it, Durbin dealt with it, there's so many things that just needs to be cleaned up and be cleaner. But that's, that's where that's going. So if you have comments on that, let us know. We'll probably put some other blogs out about it and wait and see what the court says about it. And that's that. And then the other big thing in the news has been the Google, you know.

Third-party cookies.

Yeah. So it's been all over the news lately. You know more about the cookies than I do. I mean, I used to eat a lot of cookies. Yeah, but I never understood what cookies were.

So the third-party cookies is like for tracking, you know, when someone lands on your website, you're able to generate some information, well, capture information, uh, from the user. Um, and it, you know In a sense, you know, it's a lot to do with privacy and all the other stuff that's been going on. Like you said the other day about how you feel like it's connected to the EU, the European, you know, they had a big lawsuit about Google and how they store data and all the other thing. And, you know, in a sense, yeah, it's, It's not a bad thing because, you know, people don't want their information everywhere, right? Right. Um, but for small businesses, that kind of lead capturing or data, you know, the information that we would receive, um, is detrimental, you know, to some business types, right? Um, it makes it easier to find out who you're marketing your business to, right? Right.

Who's actually looking at your website, right? What's the age category, demographic, all that zip codes?

Yeah. So, um, I'm not sure exactly what this, you know, what it means for us as like, for your, you know, digital marketers from like myself. Um, I think it's going to be a little bit more difficult to, uh get that data, right? I mean, um, but yeah, like, you know, the way with the cybersecurity and all the hacking and, and all, there's just a lot going on. Technology is growing, um, rapidly. Well, not as rapid as we—

some would like, but, um, yeah, technology is like changing, like with AI and all that. But a lot of these products I would say the jury's still out on whether they work or they don't work and how effective they really are.

Yeah. Kind of like goes back on the one podcast about platforms and how I say people need to stop being lazy. I think this is kind of like, oh, I kind of ate my words now. You know what I mean? You're going to have to do your due diligence to, you know, figure some stuff out. You know, marketing is changing. People don't, people don't want the same old, same old, right? Like they're looking for more of a personal base, personal touch, like a human touch. I agree, AI is a great tool. And, you know, I'll be using it. Is A guy who's been in SEO who started Moz, Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you're familiar with him.

No, but I know Moz.

Yeah, well, he created it. Right. It's his baby. And he just, you know, he wrote a really interesting article on LinkedIn about how, you know, he doesn't believe that AI is going to wipe out our jobs.

I don't think it's going to wipe out.

It's not. You know what I mean? If it was, it would have already happened.

Right.

You know what I mean? Um, and he— that was, that was one of his major points, you know. He's like, it's a good article, I'll share it with you when I, you know, maybe I'll share it with the people. But, um, he just made a lot of sense. And, you know, it's kind of going back to basics. I think that's what it really boils down to. It's gonna— you're gonna have to take a deep dive into figuring out who you're trying to market your products to. You know, and it a lot of times, you know, it's like a no-brainer, right? Like, um, for us, not so much because, you know, there's— we offer this to everyone, right? Payment processing is for any and every business possible. So, you know, as a, as a business owner, Allen doesn't like to put all his ducks in a row. He wants options. So For me, it's really difficult.

No, I understand that.

Like, but I'm— what I'm saying is, like, other, you know, like, if you sell t-shirts and it's got, like, graffiti on it, or, you know, whatever art that you choose, you know, typically you're not marketing that to, like, a 63-year-old man.

Exactly.

You know what I mean? So you got a lot of stuff is kind of a lot easier you know, you know, you want to target, you know, 18 to 30-year-olds, they live in the inner city, blah blah blah, you know what I mean? Like, it's easy to come up with those types of things, but, you know, for business owners with the third-party tracking, it is going to be more difficult and to, to capture those leads, right? You know, it's gonna— you're gonna have to be creative, you're gonna have to You're gonna have to really look at it. I think, I think it's going to be more— it's like you're pushing people to social media more because it's going to be a lot easier to, to track that way, right? I mean, if you see Justin Owings liked a product page, right, you know, and then you could retarget ads to me, you know what I mean? So I, I— it'll be interesting if this trickles down into social media that way, right?

Yeah, we'll see what happens because there's a lot of lawsuits going on in in the EU, and they seem to all spill back into the US.

They do, they do. And, uh, you know, it's been a— I don't know, it's been a wild ride. I've been doing this for almost 15 years now, and you know what I mean.

And so I always say my favorite book is Who Moved the Cheese? Yeah, the cheese is moving, the cheese is moving. So you got to start thinking about how to how, what you're going to do with that.

I think, yeah, like, in the e-commerce side of it is going to— I think those, those guys are going to end up feeling the brunt of it most, the most.

You know, it might increase, like, people doing affiliate marketing, but that's something that the credit card companies are really frowning upon right now.

I've never been a fan of affiliate marketing. I, I just don't— it's, to me, it's like a pyramid Hustle the pyramid scheme type of deal. Um, yeah, it, you know, just go market yourself. That's what I would say, you know, like find a product and sell it, bro.

Because now with like AI, when we get a customer, they're doing e-com, the first thing the credit card processor does is they have some search tool that goes out, searches the internet to see where their affiliate links are, and then they find them, then they see all kinds of, you know, jacked up advertising. Like there's all these people now trying sell diet pills, but they're comparing it to like Ozempic, you know. Yeah. And then, or it's trying to sell other product, you know, like CBD, and then saying, oh, it cures this and cures that, you know, on the affiliate links.

Yeah.

And then that kind of muddies up the waters for, you know, regular merchants. And then it's harder to get these guys with all these affiliate links approved.

Affiliate marketing is nuts.

Yeah, it's crazy. And then some other stuff that's been in the news is this, uh, for some reason I don't know what's going on with like data breaches. Data breaches are like out of control. Like every day I'm getting messages from Credit Karma, some other thing I signed up for. I'm like, well, your email address has been exposed. Okay, my email is exposed. What am I not going to be able do anything about that. My email— my— I've had the same email address for 23 years. So, you know, what are you going to do, change your email address?

I think the email providers are going to have to figure out a better way. I think they have to encrypt it somehow, or, you know, I mean, as a digital marketer, I've been dealing with like hacked— hacking forever, you know. I can remember I've been fortunate because I was taught well, right? You know what I mean? And to set up firewalls and, you know, other types of things to prevent those types of things to happen to our websites. And, you know, just making sure that you're not clicking on spammy links and, you know, educating, you know, you obviously you've been into tech and fintech for long enough to know you're not going to click on some stupid spammy link.

And fill up, open up, or open up any attachments that you don't know what they are. Oh man, I mean, I get attachments every day. Oh, we have a check for you. Here's an invoice. Oh, you're owed $1 million. You're owed $5,000.

Someone almost got me actually yesterday because it actually came to my inbox. Yeah. And I'm like, what is this? You know, like, but then I, as soon as I clicked it, you know, it tried to download um, a file or something, and I'm like, I'm gonna cancel that because I don't know what that is.

Exactly.

I don't know who you are. Yeah, yeah. But, um, I mean, this kind of ties into the third-party cookies and data and stuff like that, you know what I mean?

It's like, I think the email providers need to— like, when you want to get an email account, right, I think that there needs to be a level of verification. Like, absolutely, you need to upload your driver's license, do a selfie, and then you have a valid email and you get like a check mark next to it or something.

Yeah, there should be. I mean, they make us do that for everything else, right? Like some sort of two-step verification process, right? Um, yeah, you shouldn't be able to be like the one email address, uh, Muhammad not a human, not a man, right, at Gmail, you know, like, it was like literally something.

I am not a man.

I am not human.

Yeah, I am not human. Yeah, yeah, that was weird.

Uh, yeah, that was— and if that guy was like, whoever created that, but it wasn't, like, you know what I mean? You could be really creative and, you know, you had a cool email address. I've seen some pretty cool emails in my life too, right? But yeah, like it was like first name AI, not human, not human. Like that was his name. So I think you're right. Like, you know, Gmail, there's— but at the end of the day, how the hell can they monitor 100 million?

They can. They can just say, oh, if you want to use this email address, you need to verify your identity and then give you a link to click, put up your driver's license.

Yeah, connected to the Department of Motor Vehicles or whatever.

Or like now they have like ID.me, which will verify you for like paying your taxes and a bunch of other stuff.

Well, you have to sign up to pay your taxes with them.

Right, with the, yeah, ID.me. So, you know, the email companies could use that. Or I've seen like LinkedIn's using Clear.

I'd hate to say it, I hate to say it, but I, you know, I agree. Like at this point it's kind of, to the point where, um, you know, for, for security purposes, right? For safety.

Yeah, for safety. Exactly.

I mean, you're gonna have to— the— these companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. are, are gonna have to put something in place to prevent, like, yeah, they're not spoofing and, and fake, you know, emails and fake people and You know, because, but see, again, this is, it makes it hard, right? Because then, then what does that mean? Like, what about info@nationwidepaymentsystems.com or customer service?

You'd have to upload a business, you know, oh, this is your domain, upload your—

I guess you're right. It's pretty easy. Yeah.

Upload your domain registration.

We can talk it out. Like it's, it, we, because I mean, we were kind of already there, right? It's just not like you have to do it, right?

Like LinkedIn has a thing where you have to— you don't have to, but you could verify your identity with CLEAR.

I do that.

Yeah, because I have CLEAR for flying. So you can identify— so you can do that.

Well, you can— you don't have to use CLEAR.

No, they had other stuff you could do.

Upload your driver's license.

Yeah, you could upload your driver's license. And I think these platforms just need to do this stuff because It's getting out of hand. Fake Facebook accounts, fake LinkedIn accounts, fake email addresses, and it's getting worse. And with AI, it's going to continue to get worse because these people can just make some— write some script on OpenAI, right, or some other AI product and go, oh, go make me 50 emails on Gmail, right? And then the computer can go on to log on to Gmail and create 50 fake email accounts, and then the person and start spamming all over the place.

Stop giving these people ideas, man.

I'm not giving them, they're doing it already.

No, I know.

I don't have to give them an idea. No. This is the stuff that I read about that they're doing. And then this other thing I was telling you that people were doing was they put up a, they put a, they make a post on Facebook or Twitter or, you know, whatever, Instagram about like a lost puppy. Oh, a puppy was lost or a kid is missing, right? And then those posts tend to go viral because it's something like close to everybody's heart. And they do it like in a big city, right? So they do it like Fort Lauderdale, lost child, 8 years old with a picture, right? All of a sudden everybody's sharing the picture of the 8-year-old child lost in Fort Lauderdale.

And that account's gone viral.

Then the, yeah, it goes viral. Then the person goes in and puts some fake stuff on there, or just some bullshit product, right? A bullshit product or some fake GoFundMe thing, right? And then people start giving money to some scammer, right? And it's crazy. And that stuff is just going on. I was watching, there's these guys, the People's— what do they call it? The People's Network or something. These guys on YouTube and they find scammers and try to stop the scammers. Nice. And they call the scammers up in India, you know, that are scamming people. Yeah, there's one guy, Mark, has blue hair, and then there's a girl on there that sounds like, uh, Alexa or Siri or something. And, uh, yeah, they were talking about that scam the other day, and I was like, that's ridiculous. That, that— and then Facebook's not doing anything. They, you know, I think they all, all of them Mike, we need to call them all out. Facebook, Twitter, X, X, you know, Instagram, TikTok, all these companies.

LinkedIn. You guys are LinkedIn with the fake accounts. Oh yeah, terrible.

Oh yeah, every fake account is like a hot Asian girl or hot girl.

Hey, watch it.

Sorry, but that's what I see. I get like 20 of those a day trying to send me messages, and they all do it through like they get the free 30-day trial of LinkedIn Navigator, and that's how they send them, and they start sending you messages. And then if you don't go look at the message, if you go back to the message later, you'll see the user's deleted because people probably report it as spam.

Oh, for sure.

But maybe they get a few people that they scam.

I'm sure they do.

That's why all of this is needed to do this, you know, this identity thing. I just don't see how it's not hard.

I just think that the hard part, I do, for me, the hard part is everyone playing nice, right? That's what it is. Like, no one wants to, you know, like Facebook is in competition with X, etc., etc.

So they don't want to be, you know, if I was in Congress, I'd come up with a bill. I'd say you need to link up with one of these companies, whatever it is, Clear, ID.me, some other kind of thing. And everything needs to get verified and that's it. And boom, done. And then give them 6 months to do it. They can all do it. They, they could do it tomorrow. Yeah, they got enough employees and enough money. And then that would, that would cut down on probably 80, 90% of the scams going on.

No doubt. No doubt.

Because now, like on T-Mobile, you can see like phone numbers come up and it says unverified phone number. So, you know, like, that's not a good phone number.

Well, we pretty much covered it, eh?

Yep. That's it. Payment trends.

Wasn't much happening in payment trends. The Biden Cash thing, there's, I don't know what that is. What do you, real quick.

Oh, so the Biden Cash thing is these fraudsters in 2022, this group called themselves Biden Cash, and they just, they've been breaching all kinds of stuff. They put, in 2022, they uploaded over a million credit cards 2023, they released 1.9 million credit cards and debit cards into the dark web. And then just recently, another 556,000.

Wow.

And, you know, that's—

be careful out there, man.

You got to watch your, you know, monitor your bank account, monitor your credit cards, you know, look, log in, look at everything, 2FA on everything, two-factor authentication.

Yes, I agree.

And Stay safe.

Protect yourself.

Protect your—

watch your six, partner.

Yeah, because your information's on the dark web anyway. I mean, it's there. Yeah, what we need is verification. We need this verification system to go into place.

I think we got a good idea.

Yeah, we should start a movement.

Well, that's the pod for today, man. If you got anything to add on about the, you know, the, the swiping fees law that passed or the Biden, if you've been a victim of the Biden cash, we'd love to hear from you. What's your thoughts on the Google cookies dilemma? Whatever. Hit me up, man. And if you want to be a guest on the show, man, please hit me up. We're looking for guests for 2024. Got a couple up in the pipeline. So good stuff. Follow the podcast, smash that subscribe button. Peace out.

Peace out. Carpe diem.