Best-in-Class: Leap Merchant Services, powered by Stripe, offers best in class payment processing technology that delivers safe, secure, and reliable transactions, along with continued innovation to ensure your payment solution stays ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly changing environment and meets the needs of your organization. Key benefits include:

• Improved efficiency with more automation (e.g. PCI compliance) and time savings
• Increased revenue with more convenience for your patrons and donors
• Better data management to improve ongoing tracking/reporting

Ease-of-Use and Reliability: Bottom line, we’ve heard you. Saving time with a simple and reliable settlement process is a top priority. With our investment in Salesforce and Stripe technology partnerships combined with PatronManager’s deep experience with Arts & Culture organizations, we’re committed to continually evolving solutions to meet your needs.

We’ve Got Your Back: We’re committed to delivering a highly valued payments solution and with our merchant services solution, our team of experts have your back. From initial onboarding and setup to ongoing compliance management and chasing down chargebacks, our team is here to make payment processing easy, so you can focus on selling more tickets, raising more funds, and creating a delightful experience for your patrons and donors.

Yes! Through our best-in-class payments technology partnership with Stripe, Leap Merchant Services provides a leading PCI-compliant solution with improved data management that saves you time and provides peace of mind for you and your customers. That means we take care of the paperwork for you - no more annual audits, no more annual PCI compliance attestation form, and no more fees for non-compliance.

Security is built in to our solution. The payment terminals you'll use encrypt sensitive card information through secure end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the moment it is presented to the card reader.

Further, if you enter card details manually (e.g. for phone transactions), you'll do so by typing the card details into a secure iframe that pops up in PatronManager. The iframe securely sends the payment information over an HTTPS connection to our processor. No card details are entered or stored directly into PatronManager. When the success response comes back from the processor, only the card type, expiration date, and last 4 digits will be stored and shown on the Payment Transaction record.

Leap Merchant Services (LMS) is built on Stripe, so it uses Stripe's advanced fraud protection to help protect you from fraudulent transactions.

Stripe's fraud protection uses machine learning to decide which authentication methods should be applied for a transaction, and these heuristics can change over time based on trends and new data. 

If Stripe believes that a transaction may be fraudulent, it can trigger 3DS authentication. In these cases, the cardholder may need to log into their bank account and approve the transaction or copy and paste a code sent to them via SMS.

With Leap Merchant Services you can accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express.

You can also accept payments with these cards via a digital wallet in person (the terminals accept contactless payments where a patron taps their phone or watch), and online (Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported for both the Public Ticketing Site and Donation Forms).

Nothing will surprise your patrons, no. The payment forms your patrons use to enter their credit card details when they buy tickets or donate online will look and work just like they do today.

All your data in one place. With Leap Merchant Services, you will no longer need to maintain multiple logins in different systems to process payments, run reports, or view payment activity; everything is consolidated within PatronManager.

All reporting happens in PatronManager and no longer requires reconciling multiple reports from multiple systems. Consolidated reporting means less time and hassle.

Note: if you have a per-ticket fee contract with us and currently receive settlement reports from PatronManager for those per-ticket fees, that will not change.

Yes, and in your favor. With Leap Merchant Services, payout speeds will be T+2 (business days) for US and Australian clients, which is one day faster than you currently receive on Bluefin. Canadian clients will remain consistent with the current payout speed based on calendar days. Further, payouts will continue on a rolling basis as they do today, with no holdbacks and no minimums.

Based on our analysis across organizations of varying sizes and complexity, we anticipate that your overall costs for Leap Merchant Services will be equivalent, if not more favorable, with our solution.

While the credit card processing rates are nominally higher (two-tenths of a percent) with Leap Merchant Services, the Card Brand Association Fees charged on Bluefin average 0.2% but can vary widely, making costs harder to predict and understand. With Leap Merchant Services, we are eliminating all hidden, transactional, variable, and additional monthly fees from your billing equation, providing you a simpler pricing model with more predictable and consistent rates.

Further, our managed solution means you will no longer have to complete PCI attestation audits, saving you time and money by eliminating the threat of non-compliance fees.

For more information, reach out to our team.

If you're using Bluefin, you can find your current contracted credit card processing percentage rate in your Bluefin/Elavon agreement/addendum. You'll also want to refer to the monthly statements you receive from Bluefin/Elavon to review additional recurring fees, such as card brand association fees, monthly statement fees, etc.

Reach out to PatronManager support if you'd like assistance with finding and reviewing this information.

Nope! There's no cost to switch to Leap Merchant Services other than purchasing your new terminals.

Credit card processing fees are subtracted from your transaction total before your payout. This means your payout from Leap Merchant Services reflects your gross total minus credit card processing fees, and will equal the Net Total in the Credit Card Reconciliation Report.

No. As is true today with your current payment processing platform, credit card processing fees will not be refunded if a transaction is refunded.

No. Your bank account must support both credit and debit transactions to onboard with Leap Merchant Services.

Bluefin payment terminals are not transferable/compatible with Leap Merchant Services. Our approved terminal is the BBPOS WisePOS E (available from us at cost) - a more reliable terminal with advanced features including long battery life with plug-in back-up, support for EMV chip, contactless, and swipe payments, WiFi connection support, end-to-end encryption, and each terminal we sell is bundled with a ethernet/charging dock for added convenience. With this new solution, you will also likely need fewer terminals than you needed for Bluefin, which means more savings.

You bet! We've got a whole article about the terminals, which includes a set of terminal-specific FAQs.

Yes, you'll need to contact your recurring donors to add their card details for Leap Merchant Services.

You'll have a built-in report to keep track of which donors need a phone call, and many clients have found that it's a great opportunity to connect with those donors and thank them for their ongoing support.

Updating the card details for an existing recurring donation is quick and easy - no need to cancel it and start over.

Those old stored payment method tokens won't be available to select when selling tickets or creating donations, but they won't disappear from your system. You can add the Payment Gateway field to the Payment Methods related list on your Contact pages if you need a way to tell those apart.

Yes, until you close your old account. You will be able to refund transactions that were processed through your former payment processor, even after you switch to Leap Merchant Services.

Once you close your account with your former processor, you won't be able to refund those credit card transactions anymore. Instead, you could refund to cash, check, donation, or gift card.

That’s great! As an existing Stripe account holder, you can appreciate the value of Stripe’s technology. With Leap Merchant Services, we’ve developed a custom integration layer with Stripe specifically for PatronManager that allows our team to deliver a comprehensive and holistic patron management solution, including payments, for you. Unfortunately, Leap Merchant Services is not compatible with standalone Stripe accounts. To take advantage of all the benefits of our integrated solution, you must onboard with PatronManager directly.

There are a couple nuances for clients in Canada - if this is you, click below to expand the details.

A lot of that depends on you! The actual switchover from your current processor to our merchant services takes about a minute, and our team will take care of that for you at a predetermined time.

The rest can vary depending on how quickly you finish your portion of the steps (signing the contract addendum and completing your online onboarding).

Then it's just a matter of scheduling an available cutover time with our team, typically on a Monday morning. If you're currently processing in-person transactions, you'll probably want to wait until you have your new terminals, which can take a week or so to arrive after you place the order with us.

As an approximate estimate, it typically takes around 2 weeks from when a client first reaches out to us, to when they go live with Leap Merchant Services.

Nope! You can keep selling tickets and accepting gifts online seamlessly during the transition. We wouldn't recommend scheduling the cutover in the middle of your biggest on-sale of the year, but it won't interrupt your normal operations at all.

The only time a patron might encounter an issue is if they were in the middle of entering their credit card details into your online payment form at the exact moment the cutover occurs. And even if that happened, they'd just see an error telling them to try again.

We recommend scheduling the cutover for a low-volume time so that your internal staff has time to pair and try out the new terminals, but even that is somewhat flexible since you can always key transactions directly into PatronManager if necessary.

Absolutely; and you'll be able to do it yourself! Your designated user who set up Leap Merchant Services will be able to update your account info or bank account from the widget in the Client Community.

From here, you'll be able to use the pencil icons to update the information you need.

If you also need to update the bank account used for lost chargeback fees, submit a case asking for a new ACH authorization form.

We know your time is scarce and valuable. Therefore, we’ve designed a simple 1-2-3 process for moving from your current processor to Leap Merchant Services:

1. Submit a case in the Client Community to request an addendum that adds Leap Merchant Services to your existing contract.
2. Once the addendum is in place, you can set up your Leap Merchant Services account with a quick onboarding process accessed via your PatronManager login. This is a much more streamlined process than past onboarding experiences, and can be done at your convenience within minutes.
3. Once you’ve completed your onboarding, confirm your scheduled date to cutover to Leap Merchant Services and we’ll take care of the rest.

And that’s it! We’ll have you up and running in no time with simpler, easier-to-use payment services, giving you more time to focus on delivering results for your organization.