How Long Does It Take To Open An Account?
Believe it or not the process of establishing a true merchant account is usually fairly quick and easy (assuming your sales agent is knowledgeable in what they are doing). An account can be opened in as little as four hours or as long as a few days depending on when the application is submitted and the underwriting guidelines of the processing bank. The application process should never take longer then that without a clear and legitimate reason. If your application is taking two weeks to be approved and you’ve had little to no communication with your sales agent, something is wrong and you should consider canceling your application.
Establishing a third party account will vary from provider to provider as each has its own criteria and verification process. Your account can go live anywhere from immediately to several days or weeks. Also, the services made available to you may depend on verification of your business or personal information.
For planning’s sake the process setting up of a merchant account should be started two or three weeks before you expect to “go live”. This will allow for unexpected delays and testing of the account and gateway.
July 28th, 2023 at 1:12 pm
For new online businesses, there are certain website requirements that need to be met before the merchant account will be fully approved. Failing to meet these can greatly delay an application to be approved. Hopefully the sales agent made sure they were met before the application was submitted. Checking that a website meets the requirements is done by someone in the underwriting department who normally has no clue about how to navigate a website let alone check to see if the site is secure. This is probably the biggest hangup in getting online sites approved that I have seen, but the process still shouldn’t take more than a few days.