Royal Bank of Scotland Streamline
If you are selling online and you are not using a Payment Bureau such as we discussed on our payment processing page then you must have a merchant facility otherwise your customers will not be able to buy from you using their credit cards! On this page we will look at one particular example of a credit card payment processing system provided by a bank for those who already have a merchant account, as an example of the kinds of facilities which are offered by banks.
Fortunately in our remote location we have the excellent services of the Royal Bank of Scotland. For some 6 years or more we have used the Royal Bank of Scotland Streamline service. In order to find out how seamlessly our TOPS software integrates with Royal Bank Streamline, please see our presentation.
We were one of the very first lucky businesses to use the Streamline merchant facility - although initially it was called Royline. Then the Royal Bank of Scotland took over NatWest Bank and their facilities became one-and-the-same. We understand that Clydesdale Bank uses the same ecommerce credit card processing online facility too. Of course we had been a Royal Bank of Scotland merchant for several years before we started to use the Streamline / Royline facility.
Since we have been selling our TOPS software we have potential customers who are currently banking with other banks such as Lloyds TSB, Barclays, and HSBC - some of whom do have their own equivalent to the Royal Bank of Scotland Streamline service. However, in many cases these banks make it almost impossible for a small business to use, as they insist on a hardware firewall and an additional server - ensuring that it is far too costly an option for a small business to even consider.
There are other developers who have created a common interface that will work with any bank - but this can come with additional costs. Sometimes this can be a too heavy a burden for some small businesses. As we have mentioned, TOPS already interfaces with the Royal Bank of Scotland Streamline service. As a result of our ongoing research into the best value for money merchant facility we will be using ServeBase in the new version of TOPS to provide the actual processing of credit cards within our online system. This will allow our clients to then have the monies collected from credit cards to be paid into ANY existing merchant account that they have with ANY bank. There is a facility fee to pay to add the service within TOPS which is likely to be about £175.00 and thereafter probably a mere 7p per transaction - for example if you processed 1000 transactions in a year and they averaged say £60 each it would only cost you £70 for the year - in addtion to your existing merchant facility costs, of course.
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