For some time now, millions of small business owners across the country have likely been dissatisfied with their options for accepting credit and debit card payments. Typically, these come with sizable fees and require expensive equipment when traditional payment networks are involved. But now, more companies are getting involved in the industry and bringing down prices for small business owners who may be particularly concerned about their bottom lines.
Companies like Square – which has been in the payment processing market for some time, making a name for itself with lower transaction fees and equipment costs than bigger networks – have long been targeting small businesses in particular, and are now trying to better tailor their services to those clients, according to a report from the New York Times. Square has, in fact, begun to expand into small business lending to some extent, and recently introduced two services that it says will facilitate safer and quicker transactions for those companies going forward.
“We have a huge competitive advantage,” Roelof Botha, a Square board member and partner at Sequoia Capital, a leading venture capital firm that has invested in the company, told the newspaper. “No one else has the kind of visibility we have into how these businesses that use Square are doing.”
What do they do?
The two services are simple: one facilitates instant deposits of money into associated bank accounts, and the other adds more protections for merchants when a consumer disputes a purchase, the report said. Much of the functionality of these services rely on the payment data that the company collects for every transaction it handles, and as such, they will only be available – at least for now – to companies that have used Square in the past and have a solid track record of doing so. The end result, though, is that companies will have faster access to the cash they earn through their credit card transactions, as well as more protections if things happen to go awry.
Owners who want to make sure their companies are on the best footing possible may want to consider the benefits of finding ways to cut their ongoing costs. The more they can do to find more affordable small business insurance including policies for liability insurance, the better off they’re probably going to be. Such efforts can save companies thousands of dollars annually.
