a harder problem for early stage web merchants was getting a merchant financial institution .... the merchant financial institution that sponsors a merchant for payment transactions ... takes financial responsibility for that merchant.
the standard procedure was to send somebody out to the retail brick&morter and do an asset inventory ... to see if the merchant went under ... that there would be enuf assets left to help cover the merchant financial institutions losses. retail web merchants might have nearly zero assets ... they leased time with a webhosting and fulfillment was outsourced ... so there was no onhand inventory and effectively no assets. if they were totally unsuccesful ... then the merchant financial institution would have little outstanding transaction financial liability. there were cases where merchant financial institution would try and cancel a merchant as it became succesful ... since the outstanding transaction liability for the merchant financial institution could be going way up ... with no increase in assets to cover the finanical institution's outstanding liability. for such "high risk" merchants ... the merchant financial institution discount might actually be bigger than the MOTO discount ... or any difference between MOTO and card-present. early web merchants tended to be existing brick&morter operations where web MOTO ("mail-order/telephone-order") transactions were not separated out from non-web MOTO transactions. there were all sorts of strategy meetings in the '95 time-frame, brain storming about how to get a bank's financial risk department to even approve purely web merchant signup (and MOTO vis-a-vis card-present wasn't a primary issue). --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]