Mastercard Cuts Off Third Party Transactions

strredwolf writes "Mastercard has cut out third parties from charging on behalf of merchants. This affects folks paying their auctions and goods via Paypal, Yahoo! Paydirect, and potentially ebay's Billpoint. It may also affect Paypal's Mastercard-backed Debit Card, but there's no word from Paypal as far as I can tell." Word has it paypal is trying to negotiate a side deal with Mastercard.

Comments

This won't affect everyone..

[Backov]

While this may affect Paypal, it may not affect the other processors like CCBill, IBill, etc that process for porn sites. Here's what a CCBill rep I know had to say about it on one of the webmaster boards I hang out on:

CCBill, IBill, Epoch, I believe Jettis and WSB, all fall under the PSP category now, which was adopted by Visa given the range of services and type of operations we run. We are highly regulated, even more so almost every month, and we also report to Visa (and soon to be Mastercard it appears) the URLS of all sites we process for, on a monthly basis, along with a credit/chargeback report against sales for each of those urls.

It would stand to reason that Mastercard, like Visa, wants to know who is using their card to accept payment for what, which is well within their rights as a company, and well within the mysterious and fluid agreements they have with merchant account holders.

A company like Paypal, on the other hand, runs a sort of 'virtual currency' service, which is a true aggregator and a factor on the sellers side as well. Paypal doesn't qualify to be a bank, has zero regulation on what is bought and sold with Paypal transfers at the moment (or at least no enforceable regulations) and holds an absolute shitload of consumers money in trust. Since this money is transferred as a purchase instead of a cash advance, banks not only lose out on the cash advance fee they could be charging, they also stand to be liable for that money if Paypal were to go under and consumers started asking for chargebacks.

I tend to believe her about this sort of thing, I'm not too worried. They're just moving for some more control.

Cheers,
Backov