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This spring I left a job working with payments in a SaaS for the self storage industry. I don't remember exact numbers but the overwhelming majority of the card

by Merad 4y ago

This spring I left a job working with payments in a SaaS for the self storage industry. I don't remember exact numbers but the overwhelming majority of the card present payments we processed were either keyed by hand or swiped with a magtek reader. A great many self storage companies are mom and pop operations that only have one or two locations, often run by retirees to supplement their retirement income. Needless to say they (and the industry as a whole) are highly resistant to change.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
> This spring I left a job working with payments in a SaaS for the self storage industry. I don't remember exact numbers but the overwhelming majority of the card present payments we processed were either keyed by hand or swiped with a magtek reader. A great many self storage companies are mom and pop operations that only have one or two locations, often run by retirees to supplement their retirement income. Needless to say they (and the industry as a whole) are highly resistant to change. In Europe you can buy card terminals for €30 with no monthly fee, and you don't even have to be a registered business entity. Now that I check, that same company exists in the US too: https://sumup.com/ https://sumup.com/
- gtirloni 4y ago
  > great many self storage companies are mom and pop operations that only have one or two locations Exactly the type of company that should be getting one of those portable card readers that can be easily replaced. It can't be harder to enter an amount in the device and ask the customer to insert card and type pin than typing numbers or swiping many times, getting signatures, etc.
- Merad 4y ago
  We're talking about people often in their 60s or 70s who quite literally hate technology and don't want to spend any money on it unless someone puts a gun to their head. Seriously, the company I worked for had dropped support for windows XP before I ever started there, but they still had some customers running it when I left (this year). From the POV of these small business owners that Sumup terminal doesn't do anything to help them and if anything makes their life harder. It won't integrate with their business management software (our product) and most likely will have higher transaction fees than their current payment processor. The company I was with offered EMV terminals that were fully integrated with the management software (I helped write the integration), but there wasn't a lot of interest in them outside of larger companies. The small guys in general don't have a lot of incentive to care about information security. One of the other projects I worked on was migrating the management software from using encrypted CC numbers stored in its database to using tokens. When we took away the ability for users to unmask and view the full CC number some of them started saving saving card numbers in the plain text customer info fields (address, etc.).
  - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    >don't want to spend any money on it unless someone puts a gun to their head. "You won't be able to accept cards for payment unless you use an EMV terminal or tokenized card for recurrent CNP transactions." Problem solved.
    - Merad 4y ago
      Sure, but if the US government was on top of passing legislation to force businesses to stay up to date in order to protect consumers we wouldn't be having this conversation.
      - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
        It's not the government's place, it's industry's place.

by Merad 4y ago

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago

> This spring I left a job working with payments in a SaaS for the self storage industry. I don't remember exact numbers but the overwhelming majority of the card present payments we processed were either keyed by hand or swiped with a magtek reader. A great many self storage companies are mom and pop operations that only have one or two locations, often run by retirees to supplement their retirement income. Needless to say they (and the industry as a whole) are highly resistant to change. In Europe you can buy card terminals for €30 with no monthly fee, and you don't even have to be a registered business entity. Now that I check, that same company exists in the US too: https://sumup.com/ https://sumup.com/

gtirloni 4y ago
> great many self storage companies are mom and pop operations that only have one or two locations Exactly the type of company that should be getting one of those portable card readers that can be easily replaced. It can't be harder to enter an amount in the device and ask the customer to insert card and type pin than typing numbers or swiping many times, getting signatures, etc.
Merad 4y ago
We're talking about people often in their 60s or 70s who quite literally hate technology and don't want to spend any money on it unless someone puts a gun to their head. Seriously, the company I worked for had dropped support for windows XP before I ever started there, but they still had some customers running it when I left (this year). From the POV of these small business owners that Sumup terminal doesn't do anything to help them and if anything makes their life harder. It won't integrate with their business management software (our product) and most likely will have higher transaction fees than their current payment processor. The company I was with offered EMV terminals that were fully integrated with the management software (I helped write the integration), but there wasn't a lot of interest in them outside of larger companies. The small guys in general don't have a lot of incentive to care about information security. One of the other projects I worked on was migrating the management software from using encrypted CC numbers stored in its database to using tokens. When we took away the ability for users to unmask and view the full CC number some of them started saving saving card numbers in the plain text customer info fields (address, etc.).
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  >don't want to spend any money on it unless someone puts a gun to their head. "You won't be able to accept cards for payment unless you use an EMV terminal or tokenized card for recurrent CNP transactions." Problem solved.
  - Merad 4y ago
    Sure, but if the US government was on top of passing legislation to force businesses to stay up to date in order to protect consumers we wouldn't be having this conversation.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
      It's not the government's place, it's industry's place.