Yes, the name is Cocard.  I have had many people ask what the heck Cocard is.  According to a recent press release Cocard is a Nashville, TN based merchant services provider currently serving over 25,000 merchants.  The release goes on to say, “Cocard is a cooperative of bankcard professionals with 48 members and approximately 600 sales representatives located in over 60 offices throughout the continental U.S..”

So Cocard is a group of bankcard professionals who have come together as one to share resources, negotiate better pricing and basically take over the world.  I added that last part just to see if you are awake!  The bar is pretty high to get into this organization which means that if you are dealing with any office with the Cocard name in font of it you are going to receive great service and honest rates.

The reasons I chose to become a part of Cocard are:

1. Integrity - I wanted to be a part of a integral group that I could be proud be a part of.
2. Relationships - Cocard is set up with only the largest and the best payment processors and third party vendors in North America.
3. Rates - because Cocard has such a large portfolio of quality merchants the rates they have negotiated are much better than I would have received on my own.
4. Control - I am able to run my own business within Cocard (as log as I follow the rules).  This means I am able to choose and build my own price models and I don’t have to wait for someone’s approval to take quick and decisive actions for the benefit of our clients.

So I have the best of both worlds, the pricing of a large organization and the ability to make my own business as great as I want it to be.

I’ll be writing more about Cocard in the future but if you have any immediate questions you want answered feel free to comment below and I will respond promptly.

More reading: What Greensheet has to say about Cocard.

This is an exciting moment for me - this is the very first blog post for this new blog that I have started to document the journey of starting a new credit card processing company. One of my central business values is transparency. As a result, I am going to do my best to lay out all the challenges and victories for starting a business from almost nothing. I have been tempted to just pretend this company has 200 employees and has been around for years but that is not the case.

Having said that I do want to point out that we are part of a large group ISO named Cocard and partner with the very largest payment processors in North America - First Data, Chase Paymentech and National Processing Company. So in some ways we are not small at all.

So why is this business start up such a challenge? Typical answers might be a lack of significant capital, support staff or just going through the whole process of establishing our identity. Those are all challenges to be sure but the story will become interesting because of the type of company we are committed to building.

When I want to use as few words to describe what our vision is I say we are starting the “anti-merchant account company.” I know that phrase sounds a little arrogant, and a tad idealistic, but I promise you our intentions are true and all we want to do is build a company we can be extremely and profoundly proud of.

I am not much for long blog posts so this is all for now. in my next post I will start describing what an “anti-merchant account company” looks like in my mind.