Connections to executives at Visa,
MasterCard and American Express. As
no standard merchant agreement will
allow factoring (processing
transactions on behalf of another
entity), you'll need to have your
entire business supported by the card
networks themselves.
You'll need one or more banks to get
on board to underwrite your accounts.
You'll need to hire people in each
country you want to operate in to
register as a bank, comply with local
regulations, and bribe local
officials in countries where that's
necessary. Yes, in several countries,
3rd party processors like PayPal are
considered banks and have to operate
as such.
You'll need several hundred thousand
dollars just to start the process
rolling, banks won't even let you
become a normal merchant services
provider with less than that in
equity to show, let alone become a
3rd party processor.
You'll need to build the best fraud
detection systems in the world, as
that's the only reason PayPal is here
today while their many dot-com-era
competitors went out of business.
PayPal was bleeding millions of
dollars a month to fraud until IGOR
was operating.
If you're serious, your best bet might be to pitch and chase whatever VCs invested in Square, just to get the benefit of whatever their partners have learned about getting a new payment processor off the ground.
