Tiered pricing the model most processors default to is designed to look simple while quietly working against you. Your “qualified” rate applies to a fraction of your actual transactions. Everything else gets downgraded into higher-cost buckets, and most business owners never notice because the statement is built to be confusing. With interchange-plus pricing, that changes. You see the base rate Visa and Mastercard charge the same rate every processor pays and you see the fixed markup on top of it. That’s it. No surprises, no hidden tiers, no wondering why your effective rate is almost double what you were quoted.
For the independent restaurants, medical-adjacent businesses, and specialty retailers that make up Olney’s commercial core, this matters more than it might in a lower-income market. When your average transaction is $80 at a Georgia Avenue restaurant or $350 at an outpatient clinic near MedStar Montgomery Medical Center, even a half-percent difference in your processing rate adds up to real money over a year. Add True Daily Funding every day, 365 days a year including holidays and your cash flow finally matches the way your business actually runs. No more waiting until Tuesday to see what you deposited Friday night.
We are Merchant Processing Solutions Inc, an Annapolis-based payment processing company and a Registered ISO of PNC Bank. That’s not a tagline it’s a regulatory designation that means we operate under the compliance and oversight framework of one of the largest FDIC-backed banks in the country. In a community like Olney, where Sandy Spring Bank has been a trusted financial institution for generations and where business owners are accustomed to working with accountable, relationship-based financial partners, that distinction means something.
We serve businesses across DC, Maryland, and Virginia directly not through a call center in another state, and not through a templated page that lists your town as a hyperlink. We’ve won the Best of Annapolis Award for Business Development Services two years running, in 2023 and 2024, and we carry BBB Accreditation. When something goes wrong at your Olney Town Center location on a busy Saturday, you reach a real person who knows your market and understands the specific challenges Olney businesses face.
It starts with your most recent processing statement. You send it over, and we do a line-by-line review at no cost and with no obligation. Most Olney business owners who go through this haven’t re-evaluated their processing in three to five years and that review almost always surfaces fees they didn’t know they were paying. We show you exactly what you’re paying now, what you’d pay under an interchange-plus structure, and what the difference looks like on an annualized basis. No pressure, no pitch just numbers.
If it makes sense to move forward, we design a processing setup around how your business actually operates. A restaurant on Georgia Avenue has different needs than a B2B contractor serving government clients via the ICC corridor or a healthcare-adjacent practice near MedStar. We don’t hand you a package we configure a solution. That includes terminal or POS setup, gateway integration if needed, and a walkthrough so your staff isn’t guessing on day one.
Once you’re live, True Daily Funding kicks in immediately. Your revenue settles into your account every day including weekends, federal holidays, and the days around Olney Days in April when transaction volume spikes and cash flow timing matters most. And because we work month-to-month, there’s no long-term contract holding you in place if something changes.
Ready to get started?
The businesses in and around Olney aren’t all running the same type of transactions, and the right processing setup reflects that. For restaurants and retailers along Georgia Avenue or in Olney Town Center, we offer tableside payment capability, tip management, fast end-of-day settlement, and a terminal configuration that holds up during high-volume periods. For healthcare-adjacent businesses near MedStar Montgomery Medical Center outpatient clinics, specialty practices, medical supply vendors we provide a PCI DSS-compliant setup that handles high-frequency co-pays and out-of-pocket charges without adding administrative friction.
For businesses serving corporate or government clients and there are more of those in the Montgomery County market than most people realize, especially with the ICC connecting Olney directly to the I-270 and I-95 corridors we support B2B credit card processing with Level 2 and Level 3 data capability that can meaningfully reduce interchange costs on purchasing cards and corporate cards. A $10,000 B2B transaction processed with proper Level 2 data can save $100 or more compared to a standard card-present rate. Most processors don’t support this. We do.
We also support fleet card processing for WEX, Voyager, and Comdata relevant for the landscaping companies, HVAC contractors, and field-service businesses operating throughout Olney and the broader Montgomery County area. Every setup is configured for the specific business, not dropped in from a default template.
The most reliable way to find out is to look at your effective rate the total fees you paid divided by your total processing volume for the month. If you’re on a tiered pricing model and your effective rate is consistently above 2.5%, there’s a strong chance you’re paying more than you need to. Many Olney business owners we’ve spoken with are sitting at 3% to 3.8% effective rates without realizing it, because tiered pricing structures are designed to look simple on the front end while quietly sorting a large portion of your transactions into higher-cost categories.
The fastest way to get a real answer is to send us your most recent processing statement. We’ll do a free, no-obligation review and show you the actual breakdown what you’re paying now, what interchange-plus pricing would cost on the same volume, and what the annual difference looks like. For a business processing $30,000 a month in the Olney area, that difference can easily exceed $3,000 a year. That’s a number worth knowing before you renew anything.
Interchange is the base rate that Visa, Mastercard, and Discover charge on every transaction it’s set by the card networks and it’s the same for every processor in the country. Nobody can negotiate it lower. What varies is the markup we add on top of it, and how clearly we disclose it. With interchange-plus pricing, you see both numbers separately: the interchange rate for each transaction type, and the fixed markup we charge. That’s it. The math is visible and auditable.
Tiered pricing, by contrast, bundles those costs together and sorts your transactions into “qualified,” “mid-qualified,” and “non-qualified” tiers at the processor’s discretion. The rate you’re quoted typically applies only to the qualified tier, which often represents a minority of your actual volume. Rewards cards, corporate cards, and keyed-in transactions frequently get downgraded to higher tiers, and you don’t know it’s happening until you do the math yourself. For the financially literate business owners running established operations in Olney, interchange-plus isn’t just a pricing preference it’s the only model where you can actually verify you’re paying what you were told you’d pay.
Yes and the difference matters more than it sounds. Most processors advertise “next-day funding,” but that promise quietly excludes weekends, federal holidays, and sometimes even Fridays depending on their cutoff times and banking relationships. In practice, that means a restaurant that processes a strong Saturday night can wait until Tuesday or Wednesday to see those funds, depending on the holiday calendar. For businesses running weekly payroll or tight inventory cycles, that gap creates real cash flow friction.
True Daily Funding means your deposits settle into your account every single day of the year including Sundays, federal holidays, and the days around events like Olney Days in April when your transaction volume is higher than usual and your cash flow timing matters most. It’s not a marketing term with an asterisk it’s a literal daily funding schedule with no carve-outs. If you’ve been with a processor that’s been quietly holding your weekend deposits until the start of the business week, this is one of the most immediately noticeable improvements you’ll see when you switch.
In most cases, yes and the transition is smoother than most business owners expect. The main thing to sort out before you switch is whether your current contract has an early termination fee. Many processors bury these in the original agreement fees can range from a few hundred dollars to over $1,500 depending on how long you’ve been under contract and what terms you signed. If you’re not sure what your contract says, that’s the first thing to pull up before making any decisions.
On the technical side, switching processors typically involves a new terminal or reconfiguring your existing equipment, updating your payment gateway if you’re running e-commerce or invoicing, and a brief staff walkthrough on the new setup. For most Olney businesses a restaurant, a retail shop, a professional services office that process takes a day or less and doesn’t require any downtime during business hours. We coordinate the timing around your schedule, not ours, and we don’t consider the job done until your team is comfortable with how everything works.
If your business accepts credit or debit cards which, if you’re reading this, it almost certainly does then yes, PCI DSS compliance applies to you. PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and it’s the industry-wide framework that governs how cardholder data is handled, stored, and transmitted. It’s not a Montgomery County regulation or a Maryland state requirement it’s a card network mandate that applies to every business accepting card payments, regardless of size or location.
In practice, most small businesses in Olney achieve compliance through a Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) and a network vulnerability scan, both of which we help facilitate. The more important thing is making sure your terminal and gateway are configured correctly from the start because a misconfigured setup can create compliance gaps you won’t discover until there’s a problem. For healthcare-adjacent businesses near MedStar Montgomery Medical Center, there’s also the intersection of PCI DSS and HIPAA to consider when patient payment data is involved. We make sure your processing environment is set up in a way that satisfies both frameworks from day one.
Restaurants have a fundamentally different transaction environment than retail, and a processing setup that isn’t built for it will cost you in ways that don’t always show up as a line item on your statement. The most obvious differences are tip adjustment, split checks, and the time gap between authorization and final settlement in a restaurant, the card is authorized before the tip is added, which means the final settlement amount differs from the authorization. A processor or terminal that isn’t configured correctly for this can create batch errors, chargebacks, and reconciliation headaches that eat up your manager’s time every week.
For the independent restaurants along Georgia Avenue and in Olney Town Center, there’s also the cash flow dimension. A busy Friday and Saturday night generates significant volume, and if your processor doesn’t fund on weekends, you’re waiting until Monday or Tuesday to access revenue you earned two days ago. That affects your ability to pay vendors, cover payroll, and manage your weekly operating cycle. True Daily Funding, combined with a processing setup specifically configured for table-service restaurant operations tip management, tableside payment, fast end-of-day settlement is the difference between a processor that works for your restaurant and one that just technically works.
Local Resources
Other Services we provide in Olney
