One reason customers are confused about their credit card processing is that the companies that provide that service, called Merchant Acquirers, have super generic names.  Below is a word cloud of the names of all the merchant acquirers – click on it and blow it up to see the full detail.

All the names are just various permutations of “Merchant”, “Services”, “Payment”, “Solutions” and made-up words like “Bancard”. With names like that it’s hard to tell who you are doing business with – for example, “Eagle Payment Services”, “Eagle Merchant Services” and “Eagle Point Financial” are all different merchant account companies.

FeeFighters helps our customers find the best merchant account provider for their businesses and then automatically negotiate the best deal with that provider.  We also maintain a directory of all the merchant account providers with ratings and reviews, which is where I got this data for the word cloud.

The actual word frequencies are below:

services	165
merchant	156
payment	121
solutions	90
systems	74
processing	72
card	44
financial	27
national	24
bankcard	23
group	22
corporation	22
data	19
international	18
credit	18
payments	17
electronic	17
first	15
bancard	14
global	13
corp	11
com	11
business	11
usa	10
commerce	10
service	9
network	9
transaction	8
direct	8
us	7
united	7
pay	7
company	7
bank	7
associates	7
alliance	7
total	6
system	6
north	6
net	6
capital	6
technology	5
technologies	5
metro	5
information	5
gateway	5
eagle	5
consulting	5
atm	5
american	5
world	4
wholesale	4
velocity	4
universal	4