5 Tips for Choosing a Fantasy Sports Merchant Account

Searching for a fantasy sports merchant account (or a fantasy sports payment integration) can be a daunting task. Few payment processors offer merchant accounts to your industry, and the ones that do are certainly not created equal. With the fantasy football season upon us, now seems like the perfect time to share some helpful tips with you on what to look for when you start accepting payments.

1. High Risk Support

A Fantasy Sports merchant account is classified as high risk for a variety of reasons, making it difficult to find a reliable processing partner. In particular, the high ratio of chargebacks that occur for fantasy sports merchants means that most traditional banks won’t even consider working with you to set up an account. Here’s the hard truth: high risk merchants aren’t necessarily the first businesses to get approved for a fantasy sports merchant account by banks such as Chase or Wells Fargo. In fact, these banks generally tend to quickly decline any high risk applications that come across their desks.

This means that what was probably your Plan B, quickly becomes your Plan A, and without access to options that make sense for your business model, you can find yourself scrambling for solutions. Make sure that you work with a payment processor that supports high risk payments and can get you approved fast.

2. Industry Expertise

When you do find a fantasy sports merchant account provider outside of a traditional bank, it’s still common to have your merchant account frozen or completely dropped by a leading aggregate payment processor. This is the last thing you want when you’ve set up a lucrative online fantasy sports business that’s generating demand and has players eager to place bets.

Take it from a processor that has worked in this industry: you want a reliable and knowledgeable high risk merchant account provider– one that knows the ins-and-outs of the fantasy sports industry is how you’ll hedge your bets and stay processing without interruption.

3. Flexible Processing to Meet Your Business Needs

Some fantasy sports merchants may require specialty processing due to the way they process payments. This is based on your business model, which may be phone order-based or online order-based. You also may have a subscription-based model needing recurring payments. Make sure your processor can support the features your business needs.

Additionally, you’ll want to make sure that your processor can approve high-risk payment processing based on the fantasy sports your business supports, such as:

4. Chargeback Protection

Because chargebacks are common in the fantasy sports industry, a good merchant account provider will do everything in your power to help you tackle them. At Actum, we offer a product called Authentecheck™ that can allow merchants to reduce chargebacks by better protecting your business against fraud and retaining more robust transaction data in the event that a dispute does arise. Plus, we’re pre-integrated with other data aggregation providers that can both add value to your solution and help you minimize chargeback risks. You can also use Actum’s dynamic bank descriptor feature to include more details related to transactions on customer billing statements, and thereby reduce the likelihood of disputes.