Published Fri, 30 May 2008 14:58:00 +0000
We currently accept payment for both goods and ongoing services by
credit or debit card.

Now that we handle Direct Debits, and now that the UK banking industry
have just launched Faster Payments we are planning to phase out credit
and debit cards acceptance at some time.

We have stopped offering card payment as an option on new business
accounts for a long time now. We no longer offer it as a payment method
for new personal accounts with us. We are contacting customers paying
existing ongoing services by card as their card expires or before.

We have not set a date for when we will stop accepting cards as yet,
and we are keen to gauge customer reaction to this proposal.

Customers paying for ongoing services can use Direct Debit which is as
convenient but offers more controls and benefits to you, the customer,
than continuous card payments.

Customers buying goods and needing to make a one-off payment first can
now use the new Faster Payments system to transfer money to our bank.
We can check this before sending goods. This allows order and shipping
same day. We plan to automate collecting Faster Payment details from
our bank to make this simpler.

Why?

a) Fraud - cards allow more possibility of fraud and we have had issues
with this.
b) Cost - card processing is expensive for our type of industry and we
don't want to have to pass this on by way of a card payment fee.
c) Possibility of fines - even though UK contract law does not allow
for fines, our merchant services provider have advised that we risk
being fined as much as £300,000 if our systems do not fully comply with
a set of specific, and not best thought out, rules, even if there is no
security breach or losses of money or data. We take security very
seriously and always have done, but we are not prepared to cover this
level of risk.

We welcome any comments on this matter. I am happy to discuss details
on usenet news and irc with any customers as well.

--
Adrian Kennard
Director.
See http://aaisp.blogspot.com/2008/05/card-payments.html