Yeah, getting a merchant account is a royal PITA in the UK. I first applied over six weeks ago now and I won't get one for another 2 week minimum. This was ma

Yeah, getting a merchant account is a royal PITA in the UK. I first applied over six weeks ago now and I won't get one for another 2 week minimum. This was mainly due to my ignorance of the process and the glacial pace at which some of these institutions move. There's probably a blog post in this but I'm taking 2 approaches simultaneously, both will use Recurly to handle the subscription billing and the onerous part of PCI compliance and both use SagePay as my payment gateway as they face off to Recurly: 1. Applying for a merchant account with Elavon. This was initially rejected as I was taking payments in USD and they had some problem settling to a GBP business account (no idea why). So I've opened a USD business account with my bank, this has just come through so I now need to go through the application process with Elavon again. 2. Applying for a merchant account with Lloyds TSB Cardnet. They initially declined as the underwriters saw too much risk in the fact that I'm taking a recurring monthly payment, said they would only consider that sort of arrangement if I'd been taking regular cc payments with them for 12 months(!). I asked them whether they would reconsider if they could hold to the money for 60 or even 90 days... they reconsidered, and 2 weeks ago they set up a meeting for yesterday (15th), so 2 weeks of no progress. I got a phone call yesterday morning telling me the account manager was sick but we could do it all over email anyway (a pointless 2 weeks of no progress then). They have all my stuff, I'm going to chase them this afternoon. We need something like Braintree in the UK, or at least someone to come in and disrupt the market a little.