In October 2019, weAudit.com received the Better Business Bureau’s Torch Award for Ethics. It is the BBB’s top honor for business conduct, and it is decided by an independent panel of judges rather than by the BBB itself.
An award on a wall is worth very little on its own. What follows is why this particular award is worth reading about, what it does not prove, and the four questions that will tell you more about any cost reduction firm than any plaque ever will.
What the BBB Torch Award for Ethics is
The Torch Award is not a customer satisfaction score and it is not bought. Businesses apply, and the application is judged against the BBB’s Standards for Trust: building trust, advertising honestly, telling the truth, being transparent, honoring promises, being responsive, safeguarding privacy, and embodying integrity. An independent panel of judges drawn from outside the BBB reviews the submissions and selects the winners.
The part that matters for a merchant reading this page is the transparency standard. A company applying for this award has to disclose, in writing and to outside judges, how it makes its money and who pays it. In credit card processing, that single question separates almost everything.
Why an ethics award matters more in a non-regulated industry
Credit card processing is non-regulated. There is no licensing body, no required exam, and no government authority that a merchant can complain to when a fee shows up that nobody can explain.
Consider the contrast. To advise someone on where to put one dollar of savings, a person needs education, state and federal exams, registration, and continuing oversight. To take over the movement of a billion dollars a year for a business, a person needs the ability to write a check for five to ten thousand dollars to become an Independent Sales Organization. No education. No exam. No license. Nothing.
The share of merchant accounts we find are not set up correctly. Not overbilled, though many are that too, but structured wrong at the account level: interchange qualification, merchant category code, gateway configuration. That number is what happens when an industry has no education requirement of any kind.
A merchant set up incorrectly can lose well over 2.5 percent on every transaction they run. That is a far larger loss than the one dollar the licensed advisor was so carefully regulated to protect. The rules simply do not follow the money here.
So in an industry with no regulator, the only things a merchant has to go on are how a firm is paid, who pays it, and whether anybody independent has ever looked at how it behaves. The third one is what the Torch Award is.
What this award does not prove
We would rather say this than have you work it out later. The Torch Award was judged in 2019, in one BBB region, on the strength of an application and the evidence submitted with it. It is not a guarantee of results, it is not a rating of the work we do on any individual account, and it is not a substitute for you asking hard questions before you hire anyone, including us.
Any firm can point at a logo. A logo is not a business model. What follows is.
Four questions to ask any firm that offers to cut your processing costs
Ask these of us, and ask them of everyone else you talk to. The answers will sort the field faster than any review site, because they go to structure rather than to promises.
How are you paid, and by whom?
There are three models. A residual paid by the processor. A percentage of whatever savings are found. Or a flat fee paid by the merchant. The first two mean somebody other than you is funding the advice, or that the advisor’s income rises with a number they calculate themselves. We charge a low fixed monthly fee based on volume and account complexity, never a percentage, and never an advisory fee. It is published on this site for merchants processing five million dollars or less; above that we quote, because those accounts carry real complexity and often many locations.
Whose side are you on if the processor offers you money?
Processors pay residuals, and they pay them for the life of the account. Any firm that accepts one is being paid by the party it is supposed to be negotiating against. We never receive a penny from any processor in any scenario, so our fee is identical whether you stay where you are, renegotiate, or move. weAudit is partially owned by an attorney, and we apply the attorney’s rule: you never represent two parties whose interests conflict. We represent the merchant only.
What happens if I want out?
Read the engagement agreement before you read the sales sheet. Percentage firms usually buy their no upfront cost offer with a multi year lock in, which is the actual price of the free start. We are month to month with no contract, and we carry a sixty day full money back guarantee: if you do not love what we do, you get back every penny you paid and you are released. We would rather earn it every month.
Who has checked your work?
Not who wrote the testimonial, but who independent has reviewed the conduct. An outside judging panel, an attorney, a client’s own CFO reconciling the statement afterward. Anything that is not the firm grading its own homework. Then ask whether the savings are verified on the statement afterward or simply asserted in a report at the start.
Worth saying plainly: none of this means you should hire us. It means you should be able to get straight answers to four questions from anyone you do hire. If a firm gets cagey on question one or question three, you have learned what you needed to know. If you want a second set of eyes before you decide, our free audit costs nothing and puts no obligation on you.
The practices behind the award
These are the specific things the application described, and they have not changed since:
- We are paid by merchants and by no one else. No processor residual, no revenue share, no referral fee from anyone whose fees we audit.
- The fee is flat and stated up front. It does not move because the savings turned out to be larger, which means we have no incentive to inflate what we found.
- The first audit is free, so a merchant finds out whether there is anything wrong before any money changes hands.
- Sixty day full money back guarantee, framed around fit rather than around a forecast. If it is not right for you, you get every penny back.
- Month to month, no contract, no early termination fee on our side. Our clients stay because of the work.
- We try to fix the processor a client already has before we suggest moving. Switching is disruptive, and it is not automatically the answer.
- We do not name our clients or publish their numbers. We tell people we never kiss and tell, and we mean it.
- We do not endorse or condemn any processor. Every one of them lets salespeople write whatever deal they can get, which is exactly why none of them publishes pricing.
That last point deserves one more line, because merchants ask constantly which processor is the good one. The honest answer is that the question is aimed at the wrong target. Two businesses on the same processor can have wildly different statements, one fully disclosed and one showing almost nothing, because the deal was written by a commissioned salesperson with latitude. The question that actually predicts your cost is who structured the deal, who negotiated it, and who read the contract.
Questions merchants ask
What is the BBB Torch Award for Ethics?
It is the Better Business Bureau’s highest recognition for business conduct. Companies apply, and an independent panel of judges from outside the BBB evaluates each application against the BBB Standards for Trust, which cover honest advertising, transparency, honoring promises, safeguarding privacy, and integrity in practice.
When did weAudit win the Torch Award?
In October 2019, from the BBB office serving the St. Louis region, Greater Missouri and Southern Illinois. The award was made to weAudit.com, which does business as the dba of Merchant Relief Council, LLC, the company founded in 2009.
Does an ethics award mean the industry is regulated?
No, and that is much of the point. Credit card processing is non-regulated. There is no license, no exam, and no oversight body for the people who set up and price merchant accounts. Independent recognition and a clear compensation model are what a merchant has instead of a regulator.
Does weAudit take a percentage of the savings it finds?
No. We charge a low flat monthly fee based on processing volume and account complexity. We do not take a percentage of savings, we do not charge an advisory fee, and we keep none of what we find for you. A percentage model pays the auditor more the bigger the number they report, and that number is calculated by the auditor.
Does weAudit get paid by processors?
Never, in any scenario. Our fee is the same whether you stay with your current processor, renegotiate with them, or move elsewhere. That is deliberate: we are partially owned by an attorney, and we hold to the principle that you cannot represent two parties with conflicting agendas.
How often does an audit actually find something?
We find savings on roughly 99 percent of the audits we run. The main reason is interchange, which makes up eighty to ninety percent of what a merchant pays to accept cards, and which changes twice a year, every April and every October, across more than two hundred rules and rates at a time. Accounts drift out of the right categories, and almost nobody is watching.
Send us a recent statement. We will run the full ten point audit and tell you what we find, including nothing if that is the answer. It is free, there is no obligation, and it takes you about five minutes to find out.
Get My Free Audit 800-672-1292Written by Robert Day, founder of weAudit.com, who spent more than a decade as an executive at Fifth Third Processing Solutions, later Vantiv and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments, before he started auditing the industry he came out of.
Related reading: what a credit card processing audit costs, the credit card processing statement decoder, and the processor scoreboard.
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