What do you think about the lawsuit Heartland Payment Systems (company) filed against Mercury Payment Systems? Is it a marketing ploy or justice being served? Or both?

AND, what's your point?  Lol It sounds like Hearland's retention department is just horrible. The reality is YES the industry does have problems and most pay way more than they should because they're poorly informed, but that's not exclusive to the processing industry. Merchant processors have always differentiated themselves from the competition with, "creative", pricing structures.  Pricing matrices are fundamentally what built most industry leaders, and the banking industry in general. The way the industry is structured essentially forces them to. At a higher level there's managing risk, support, etc, but 90% of the deals are closed with minimally taught base level sales guys who primarily just manipulate fees and hide profits. Personally I'd rather sell the value of a product or service, but in truth those guys are pretty limited if forced to sell off value. I'm not in the industry and wouldn't be, but my educated guess is Heartland has either a weak cancellation policy Mercury is capitalizing on, or no contracts period. If so Heartland filing a suit that draws attention to that just made them a bigger target and this will be a costly mistake. In order to, "win", they're going to have to prove the, "criminal glove", fits...so a jury will probably acquit. If Mercury was taking enough business for Heartland to file a suit I'm sure it slowed them down enough to pay for the filing, but I'll be surprised if Heartland wins the counter suit that will inevitably come. Either way I can't imagine it'll help from a marketing perspective longterm unless it benefits a needed short term evaluation. From a justice perspective, the only way for the merchant and indirectly the consumer to not to get screwed by the industry as a whole would be to rebuild the entire industry from top down, and that won't be happening anytime soon. The short answer to your question is neither, this is just stupid.  I'll be extremely surprised if anything beneficial for anyone comes of this and my guess is they just want to screw with Mercury. Personally I think Heartland should be embarrassed. If your serving your customers correctly and providing a competitive price point there shouldn't be enough difference for a, "good", salesman to convert the customer even if they did flat out lie...which I doubt was happening.

It sounds like Mercury is a dishonest company. If Heartland proves its case I would guess that Mercury is liable. It sounds like they are cheating on what amounts to a cost plus contract. Could be regulatory liability as well.