Thank you to the more than 40 people who joined us on our July 21 virtual briefing regarding an opportunity for our Pharmacy/Facility Members to save on their credit card processing fees.

During the free webinar, two representatives from CMSPI, an international specialist in payment processing, gave attendees an overview of what a group purchasing arrangement for our Pharmacy/Facility Members on credit card processing fees might look like.

The presenters explained that CMSPI used APC member-provided data to estimate that the average APC member pays around $0.28 per transaction for credit card processing fees, also noting that this estimate, excluding high risk transactions.

CMSPI then merged its benchmarks for similarly-sized merchants with the APC data to then create a model to show potential levels of savings—depending on the number of participating PFMs—which showed that members could achieve processor margins as low as $0.07-0.15 per transaction. They key takeaway is: the more participants, the greater the potential for savings.

Next steps

The CMSPI presenters had two requests of APC PFMs that are interested in exploring this opportunity further:

• Fact check the assumptions CMSPI presented
• Collect 1-3 months of invoices as well as provide the name of the current processing software they are using
• Send the above information to Jason Dunn (jason@a4pc.org)

While the CMSPI presenters didn’t give a hard deadline for the above requests, they said the sooner the better.

Lastly, Scott pointed out that this group purchasing opportunity is open only to Pharmacy/Facility Members. To learn more about becoming a PFM, please click here.

For those who wish to watch the video recording, click here.