Okay Weird Question But... How To Change Ownership Of Processing Account?

Does anyone know what the best method of changing ownership of a processing account it?

This is just hypothetical at the moment but it could become something we need to know in the next few days and, id rather be ready to know how to do it in case we need to.

Lets say Company A owns several paysites and the process with CCBill and Epoch.

If we purchase Company A are we able to transfer the processing accounts into our name without having to register the company with Visa again?

Quite frankly we dont intend to do any business under the Company A name but want to take over the operations of that company entirely under the GA Media umbrella.

So does anyone know the answer to this and, more importantly, how easy / complicated it is to transfer processing from one company to another?

Regards,

Lee

Don't know how it works in Adult or the US for that matter but in Australia, normally if the business is sold as a going concern changing the details over to a new buisness is normally just a matter of changing the name on the papers. I don't know if this helps!

Allan

Not exactly sure how it works with those companies, but for a few of the companies that I know about, they close down the merchant account / 3PP and then re-open it. And one acquirer just has them submit a new application and changes the information there.

We had to do that, Lee, when we bought our company from our ex partners.

CCBill required us to send the contract over to them, to prove we had legally made the purchase...and then we filled out paperwork and that was that.

Don't know about Epoch, as we had opened that account after the partnership was split.

Lee,

It's best you be prepared to do some paperwork and faxing.

The processing companies don't have a legal leg to stand on if they don't get new paperwork with the signatures and business information on file.

I don't know if they will ask for application fees, but some companies will in this case.

It would be best to think of it as opening a new account... and then... if they say you don't have to do this or that, consider it a blessing or a gift!

PapaBear

We went through this with ccbill twice.

The first time, the original owner of the site took on partners and we changed the business entity from a sole proprietorship to a corporation. In that case, all we had to do was fill out a couple of "change name" papers, we didnt' have to do a new contract or anything.

The second time, the original owner/proprietor left the company, but the corporation that owned the sites itself stayed the same. In this case, we had to do a new contract because the original signing person had left the company. But no new Visa fee. Not sure if we would have had to pay that if the corporate name changed.

What I find a little odd is that CCBill is apparently incapable of recognizing a corporation as a corporation. Legally, a corporation is like a person in the eyes of the law, and so a corporation can continue to transact business even if it has a single stockholder and that stockholder dies or whatever... provided that there is someone who is an authorized officer of the corporation. CCBill apparently doesnt' get this and requires that ONE SINGLE INDIVIDUAL be the responsible party, though they will add additional "authorized people". I'm trying to imagine Wal-Mart (or any public corporation) having a ccbill account and ccbill saying that only one person in the entire company has the ultimate authority over the account. What happens if that person leaves/dies/etc? Sounds like a mess to me.

In our case, boyfunk, two of the principles of the corporation were bought out, so new corporate papers were drawn up by us...well, not new articles, but the addendum.

They needed to see the addendum to the corporate papers and the sales contract to ensure we were not trying to pull anything 'funny', which is understandable. I'm sure they've dealt with corporations trying to move partners 'out'....

I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say that CCBill only recognises one, even though a corporation means you are 'one'. CCBill recognises both my husband (his turn to be president this year) and me ( I think I'm treasurer) Emails come to both of us.

What I meant was that both of us get the emails and both of us can contact ccbill for support issues and such, but for some reason they seem to only allow one individual to sign the contract, and seem to only allow the individual who signed the contract to make changes (such as, for example, to add telephone billing.)

We just filled out this new form that purports to allow either of us to do anything, but still shows one of us as the "owner" of the account. Who knows, maybe it's a Visa thing.

Just contact CCbill.