What happened to being able to choose your own credit card procesor ?

Now that 70% of companies are owned and/or controlled by credit card processing companies, the ability to make a "real" choice is becoming extinct. It used to be that the only difference was that certain processors would assist with the cost of the POS credit card gateway software that is needed to connect to the processor. Now, a merchant/business owner has to weigh the additional costs that they will incur by choosing not to go with the processing company that owns the POS software that they are using.

Or in recent cases , a large Card Processing company buys some of the larger resellers of POS software in large markets, in order to switch many of their customers to their procesing network, otherwise the costs for support and maintenance will be much higher.

Here are some examples:

GLOBAL who owns HEARTLAND Payments: owns XPIENT, Dinerware, PC America and Digital Dining

I3 Verticals: owns large NCR/Aloha dealers SDCR (San Diego Cash Register)

Shift4: owns Future POS, Posi-Touch POS , HarborTouch, Restaurant Manager

https://medium.com/@JJThaeler/like-heartland-shift4-will-face-a-pos-product-conundrum-c4ab8784a3d5