Why Halfpenny
This piece is a draft. The figures and sources will be checked again before it is called finished.
A halfpenny was the smallest coin in the drawer. Nobody counted it. The payments industry lives on the fraction of every sale that nobody counts: a few hundredths of a percent here, a monthly fee with a new name there, a lease that outlives the hardware it paid for. Halfpenny is the publication that counts it.
This page says who is counting, why the name is a pen name, what stake the author has, and what you are owed for reading.
The seats
I have worked in payments and point-of-sale for years, and in nearly every seat at the table. I have answered the support line when a merchant's station would not take a card on a Friday night. I have installed the hardware on site, run the cable, and stayed until the first ticket printed. I have resold software. I have worked inside an ISO, the kind of company that signs merchants up for card processing and earns a share of every sale for as long as they stay. I have worked on the software side, building and shaping what merchants use. And most of it has been in and around restaurants, which is where card payments, tips, software and thin margins all meet on one counter.
The one seat I have not sat in is the issuing bank's, the bank whose name is on the card. When I write about that seat, I write from the published rules and from what the other seats can see of it, and I say so.
That is the whole claim to authority here. Not credentials. Seats. I have seen the same forty-dollar card tap from the merchant's side, the installer's side, the reseller's side, the ISO's side and the software's side, and I know what each one does when it thinks nobody is counting.
What this is
Two things, in one place.
It is an explainer. How the money moves from the card to your bank account, who takes what on the way, where the rules are written, and where they are broken. Those pieces have numbers with their sources, and every jargon word is explained the first time it appears.
It is also a witness. The good, the bad and the ugly of what those years showed me, written down. Where a merchant is being quietly overcharged, I will say how. Where a customer (the cardholder) is working a chargeback as a refund, I will say that too. Where a processing bank, an ISO or a reseller agent sells what pays them rather than what serves the merchant, I will name the tactic. Where a software company has designed its product so that leaving is possible in theory and ruinous in practice, I will walk through the mechanism.
And not all of it is bad. Some things in this industry have got genuinely better, some companies do the job honestly, and the pieces say so when it is true. A publication that only finds fault is not fair, and fair is one of the three words this one is held to.
Who it is for
Merchants, first: the owners of restaurants, cafés, shops and salons who pay the fees and sign the contracts, usually without anyone explaining either.
The people who sell and service merchant accounts: ISOs, agents and their staff, many of whom want to do it honestly and are squeezed by the same structure as the merchants they serve.
People coming into the industry, who want to understand why a card payment costs what it costs before someone with a quota explains it to them.
And, on some pieces, the cardholder. The tip screen, the surcharge line and the receipt are things the customer sees, and the customer is owed an honest account of them too.
What it stands for
The merchant should own the merchant. Their data, their customers, their menu, their hardware, their right to leave. Software and processing are services a merchant buys, not a structure a merchant is held inside. Most of what is written here comes back to that one question: who owns the merchant?
The big players set the terms most merchants live under. I will say where those terms are unfair, and what a smaller builder or an honest ISO can do instead. I do not only write about it. Part of my work is shaping what smaller builders ship, and I count that as doing my part.
The remit is anything the counter touches. The fee, the statement, the contract and the software, yes. Also the tip screen and what it did to tipping, who keeps the tip, what a chargeback actually is, and how the market moved from the days when an ISO sold you a terminal to the days when a software subscription comes with its own card processing attached.
The name
There is no real name here and no face. The avatar is a mark, not a person.
The reason is plain. I would rather the work be judged on its evidence than on who is saying it, and I would rather stay out of the picture. The pen name is not a disguise for independence, and it is not a way of saying things I would not put my name to. Everything here is written to be checked: the figures carry their sources, the rules carry their citations, and where I am giving an opinion it is marked as one.
The stake
Here is the part a pen name makes more important, not less.
I still work in this industry. I advise POS and app builders on the features they build, on the merchant pain points those features answer, and sometimes on their billing structure and pricing. I do not own a POS. I am not selling you one.
But you cannot tell from the outside which products carry my input, and I would not want you to have to guess. So the rule is this: where a piece touches a product I have advised on, or have any stake in, the piece says so, in that piece, every time. A piece about a merchant's pain point and a piece about a product that answers it are kept apart, so the first is never a doorway to the second.
Nothing here is paid for by anyone else. There are no sponsors, no affiliate links in reviews, and no coverage for sale.
What you are owed
In return for reading, you are owed four things.
Evidence. A number comes with where it came from. A rule comes with where it is written. A claim about a named company comes with public evidence or that company's own published terms, or the company is not named and the practice is described instead.
Disclosure. Said above, and repeated in every piece where it applies.
Fairness. The same test applied to everyone: the merchant, the customer, the bank, the ISO, the agent, the software company. The same standard applied to the things that have got better as to the things that have not.
Plain words. Written the way a knowledgeable friend explains a statement across a table. Short sentences. No hype in either direction. Every piece about an abuse ends with what the honest version of that job looks like.
What you are not owed is advice. This is not legal advice and not tax advice. The pieces explain the rules and point to the rule's source; what you should do about your own business is your lawyer's or your accountant's call, and the pieces say so where it matters.
Where to start
If you have a processing statement in front of you and do not know what it says, start with how to read your processing statement. If you have been told a salesman can get you a better interchange rate, start with what interchange is. Everything else follows from those two.
Halfpenny counts the fraction of every sale that nobody counts. Who owns the merchant?