Credit Card Processing Service Orange County with Chris Trout, Cutting Edge, Bank Services

Chris-Trout

Chris Trout / Cutting Edge – Bank Card Services, Inc.

I was born in Fontana, cause my moms a teacher and that’s where the big Kaiser Hospital was. So, I actually grew up my entire life in LaVerne, 18 straight years. I used to come down to Newport Beach to go surfing and then I learned there was a UC School really close by.

So, I decided that would be the place for me, not to far from mom and dad. I could still go home and do laundry; take food out of the refrigerator. It was a really good school and a really good education. Yes, I did get a degree in Sociology. I felt like it was the best intersection where history and current events intersect.

I actually have what is called a TEAFL which is Teaching English As a Foreign Language. For a couple of years after college, I moved to Spain, specifically Madrid and taught English to businessmen and lawyers. That was pretty cool. That was a pretty nice life.

You can’t pay those people to work, by the way, you really can’t. If they have a Thursday holiday, they take Friday off and the whole country does it. It was a different lifestyle. So I made it back when my brother got married, I was Best Man at his wedding.

While I was home, I got offered a job to get into medical device sales, which I jumped at because I had heard good things. Don’t believe the good things they tell you about medical device sales.

Doctors are crazy and they aren’t nice to people they feel are beneath them, which is everybody. So I put my time and effort in, I did about 2-1/2 years and I had to train my own replacement for about 3 months. One day my bosses said, alright, you’ve done everything we’ve asked of you, you can go. And I cartwheeled out the door! Never to return again.

For that, I learned a lot about sales. That’s absolutely the hard-sale industry. It’s all relationship building, it takes time to get one guy to trust you, to give you one case. So I learned about that and I always had a head for numbers.

I really liked the statistical class you have to take in UCI. So, I felt like credit card processing was a good way to go, where I get to look at numbers, it’s a little bit of accounting. You do have to get out there to get people to trust you, before they’ll even give you a chance to look at what they feel is very private information. And I absolutely understand. But then I find that we have a reputation for kind of being criminals in this industry.

I’ve been looking around and sometimes I agree with what you think about us. I look at some of the other deals and I just think, who the hell would sign this? But, we thrive off of your ignorance; and so I’m going to try to spend the next 5 minutes educating you as much as I can about what we actually do for a living.

First things first, we do provide you with the machinery to accept credit cards. Or if you’re a restaurant or just have a certain type of setup on your computer that’s called a POS System? We just go into the internet and hookup into that. If it was up to Visa, MasterCard and American Express, anytime somebody swiped a card and you get $100, you wouldn’t see that money for 3 months.

Because it’s credit, they want to make sure no one is going to dispute the charge; no one is going to charge it back; nothing shady happened, the credit card wasn’t stolen. So they take their time in order to protect themselves. But business owners can’t do business that way. You couldn’t wait 3 months for your money to come in. So another bank comes along and says, oh no, Visa and MasterCard, they’re good for it. We’ll get you your money in 2 days but we’re going to take a little bit off the top, just like Visa and MasterCard does. So each and every card, actually has a different price associated with them.

Now I’d like to talk to you guy about Rewards Cards because this is the big change that’s been going on lately. Rewards Cards are those cards that Samuel L. Jackson says you get miles, you get points, you get money back. And it’s true. The average month, you get about $25 in Rewards Cards if you’re an average user. But, what they’ve found is that it increases your spending by about $79 a month.

Because in you mind, you say, oh I’m getting points. There’s an argument not to accept American Express because they’re expensive. But, Rewards Cards are just as expensive and you must accept them by telling Visa, MasterCard you’re taking their cards. You have to take all of their cards. So there’s other types of cards that are going to cost you more.

Very few people have the regular credit card anymore; the do nothing for you, not debit card, just a regular credit card. You don’t see those very often. Oh, another thing about Rewards Cards is the average debt went up $190 in the first three months.

This is all sourced from a poorly named but really good book called, How To Be Richer, Smarter And Better Looking Than Your Parents. It’s a terrible title but it’s a really well-written book, the guy has lots of information. He talks a lot about credit cards. So you as a consumer and you as a businessman, think about this both directions.

The average household with credit card debt is $15,000 in debt. So that means people are spending money they don’t have. And the ability to accept credit cards is imperative. But as a consumer, let’s try not to be that particular household. In 1992, Americans thought they had 70 billion dollars in credit card debt. It turns out it was 182 billion. And this is what Visa and MasterCard are constantly telling people, is that, people spend more money; they buy more expensive items and the spend before they are ready, if you accept credit cards.

So it’s always a good thing, especially if you’re a shop owner because Purdue has found… So they took tow groups of people and surrounded one group with Visa and MasterCard signs and they told them, oh, don’t worry about that. That’s for a different experiment. Then they asked them, how much would you pay for that cup? How much would you pay for that glass? How much would you pay for that plate? People surrounded by the Visa and MasterCard signs, even though they were told to ignore them, spent about twice as much and made their decision much, much quicker.

Chris Trout
Cutting Edge – Bank Card Services, Inc.

Account Representative
1322 Bell Ave., Ste: 1L 

Tustin, CA 92780
Cell (949) 378-4783
Office (714) 258-7751
Fax (714) 258-7751
christrout@ce411.com
Cutting Edge  – Bank Services