Save Thousands on Payment Processing: Mark Dolan from Tiger Payments | F&D Mastery Podcast #72

Tiger Payment Solutions is a small, family-run merchant services company (born out of a fifth-generation oil business) that competes with Square and Stripe by offering white-glove, live-person support with no long-term contracts, month-to-month terms, and clients who have stayed 20 years.

The bulk of any card fee is driven by the card type the homeowner uses: rewards/airline-miles credit cards carry the highest interchange, debit cards are far cheaper because funds pull straight from checking, and in-person transactions cost less than online due to lower fraud risk.

Contractors running payments through QuickBooks are typically charged 3% on credit cards and 1% on ACH, meaning a $1M business can lose roughly $30,000 a year and a $3M business close to $90,000 (multiple salaries) in fees they could drive down or offset.

Tiger offers a free, no-obligation analysis of a contractor's current statements to expose hidden fees, non-PCI-compliance charges, and rate creep, then shows how to either lower costs or compliantly pass fees to the homeowner so processing nets out to zero.

Faster payment methods (text-to-pay links, iPhone/Android apps, website portals, mobile terminals with Apple Pay and Google Pay) plus next-day funding fix the old-school cash-flow problem of mailing invoices and waiting 30 to 60 days for a check.

Switching is frictionless: a quick application, no setup or disconnect fees, and you can keep your existing processor running in parallel until Tiger is live and the savings are proven, so you never risk being unable to take a payment.

As homeowners increasingly insist on using credit cards for large deck and fence projects to earn miles, contractors who refuse cards are losing jobs, and Mark advises auditing your processing statements regularly like any other key business process.