Card Payments 2020

© Mary Ratcliffe, 2021

My Experience

I’m hoping my recent experience of taking card payments might be relevant and helpful to new therapists, people working part time and anyone else needing something with no contract and no monthly fee.

I had been using WorldPay (previously called Streamline) and 123-Send for a fairly mainstream card payment facility for about 10 years even though the high fixed costs and minimum charges made it quite expensive when I didn’t have many clients.  

It was a real pain once a year to be PCI-DSS compliant. It stands for ‘Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard’, which sets the requirements for organizations and sellers to safely and securely accept, store, process, and transmit cardholder data during credit card transaction to prevent fraud and data breaches.

Becoming compliant and maintaining compliance annually is required if you take card payments and fines are imposed for each month of non-compliance. The process used by WorldPay involved trawling through an incredibly complicated form, most of which was irrelevant to my situation, and being forced to give Y/N answers to questions where N/A was how I needed to respond.

In 2019, it became even more expensive and even more annoying. They seemed to make the PCI-DSS process impossible for me unless I paid a further monthly fee for which they would fill in the form for me.

At that point, I was paying about £50 a month for all the various fees before taking a single payment!