# The Ones Who Show Up: Inside the ISO Channel

> A plain-English book by Ben Love about Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) and the agents who sell card payment acceptance to small businesses across the United States: how the business works, how the money moves, how the best ISOs grow, and how vendors can sell to them.

## About the Book

- Title: The Ones Who Show Up: Inside the ISO Channel
- Author: Ben Love
- Formats: Kindle eBook, paperback and hardcover, sold on Amazon
- Language: English (US)
- Subject: merchant acquiring, payment processing sales, Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs), payments agents, residual income, small-business card acceptance in the United States
- Length: 20 chapters in five parts, with checklists, worked examples, tables and cartoons

## Who It Is For

- People who run an ISO or want to: building the company, agents, economics, contracts, risk and underwriting, compliance, moving from retail to wholesale, and selling an ISO
- Independent agents who sell payment acceptance: what they sign, how residuals build, and what a good ISO owes them
- Companies that sell to ISOs: terminal makers, point-of-sale software companies, gateways and lenders
- Payments professionals from outside the US who need to understand the American channel
- Anyone curious about what happens when a card is tapped at a small business

## Key Ideas

- An ISO earns a residual: a small share of each card sale, paid monthly for as long as the merchant keeps processing with it.
- On a $100 card sale, most of the cost is interchange and network fees that nobody in the sales channel can negotiate; only the markup is negotiable.
- The ISO channel began as a workaround to US banking laws that kept banks from crossing state lines, and it has outlasted many predictions of its end.
- The best ISOs get their next merchants through the ones they already have.
- A residual portfolio is usually valued as a multiple of net monthly residual ("times monthly"); a whole ISO company is valued on earnings.

## About the Author

Ben Love has spent twenty-eight years in payments across thirty-six countries. He worked at Visa and at Fiserv, where he was part of the team that brought the Clover point-of-sale system to market, and he has run North American businesses for payment terminal makers.

## Links

- [Book website](https://insideiso.com/)
- [Kindle edition on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HP8R3PZL)
- [Paperback on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HP8W2GD5)
- [Hardcover on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HP97HKFW)

## Contact

Inquiries, team copies, interviews and speaking: team@insideiso.com