Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

The US payments arm of Xplor Technologies, and the company you knew as Clearent until it dropped the name in July 2025. It is a straightforward mid-market acquirer with two things going for it that most of its peers do not have: interchange-plus is the default rather than the upsell, and next-day funding runs on an 11:00 p.m. Eastern cut-off, which is about as late as this industry gets. The trade-offs are the ordinary ISO ones — a three-year term and a per-location early termination fee reported at $395, a PCI non-compliance charge around $25 a month, and an annual fee that steps up after year one. Nothing here is published by the company, which is the recurring frustration.

Not published by the company. Interchange-plus is Xplor Pay's default model, and independent reviewers who have audited merchant statements put the typical markup at roughly 0.50% over interchange, with individual accounts seen as low as 0.20% + $0.10. Flat-rate and tiered plans are also offered — one audited account was on a flat 2.59% that worked out at a 2.65% effective rate. Those are third-party statement audits, not a rate card; use them as a benchmark for whether your quote is competitive, not as a quote.

Two business days on the standard schedule.

Expert grade BRead review →

Payroc

A Chicago-area merchant acquirer that has spent twenty years buying its way to scale — seventeen-plus acquisitions since 2016, most recently BlueSnap in October 2025 — and now reports around $125 billion of annual volume across roughly 190,000 clients in the US, Canada, the Caribbean, the UK and the EU. It runs its own gateway, its own POS line and its own boarding and reporting APIs, which makes it a credible one-integration partner for software platforms and ISOs. What it does not do is publish a price. Payroc sells almost entirely through commission-paid agents and referral partners, so the rate, the term and the cancellation fee you get are set by whoever signs you, and the most consistent merchant complaint is being told there was no early termination fee and then being billed several hundred dollars for one.

Not published. Payroc quotes through its agent and partner network, and the same platform is sold on interchange-plus, flat rate, tiered, surcharging and dual pricing depending on who is selling it. Because the seller's commission comes out of the margin between your price and their buy rate, two merchants on identical volume can end up hundreds of basis points apart. Ask for interchange-plus with the markup stated as a separate line, and ask for it in writing before you sign anything.

Next-day funding is offered on card volume, with same-day available on some programmes; a merchant review describes money arriving the next day as routine. The exact schedule and cut-off are set per account.

Expert grade BRead review →

PAYARC

A Greenwich, Connecticut processor founded in 2016 that has grown quickly by selling through agents and software platforms, and by building an unusual amount of AI tooling into its partner stack. It is more forthcoming than most about mechanics — its own partner documentation publishes a default fee schedule, chargeback pricing that differs for restricted and high-risk merchants, and the card-network high-risk registration costs that most processors let merchants discover on a statement. That transparency sits awkwardly next to its public record: a Trustpilot score of 1.4 from 46 reviews, sharply polarised, with recurring accounts of suspended accounts, withheld funds, billing after cancellation and three-year terms merchants say they did not agree to.

PAYARC supports interchange-plus, bundled flat rate, tiered and dual pricing, and does not publish a rate card. Third-party reviewers report a flat-rate option at 2.9% + 30¢ online and 2.49% + 30¢ in person, and a set of volume-banded 'membership' plans that replace the percentage with a monthly fee — reported at $69 a month with 0% + 15¢ per transaction under $25,000 of monthly volume, rising to $250 a month with 0% + 5¢ above $100,000. PAYARC's own marketing separately claims an interchange-plus markup 'as low as 0.035%' with no monthly or gateway fee; read that as a best-case floor for a large account, not a quote.

Next business day if the batch is submitted before 9:00 p.m. Eastern, per PAYARC's own settlement documentation. The cut-off itself depends on which sponsor bank you are boarded to: Chesapeake Bank runs dual windows at 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Eastern (2:00 p.m. Sunday); Synovus 8:00 p.m. with a 6:00 p.m. first window; Pathward 9:30 p.m. on the Fiserv Wholesale/Clover programme and 9:25 p.m. on Fiserv PayFac; Evolve Bank & Trust and Fresno First Bank 6:00 p.m. Monday to Saturday and 2:00 p.m. Sunday; ACH through Payliance at 8:00 p.m. daily. Ask which bank you are on — it decides your deadline.

★ 1.4 trustpilotRead review →

Nadapayments

ISO

A surcharging specialist that does one thing and publishes exactly what it costs: your customer pays a 3.00% surcharge when they use a credit card, you pay nothing, and you pay 1.50% + 25¢ when they use a debit card, plus $35 a month for the terminal. That is the entire price list, on the website, with no sales call — which in this industry is close to unheard of. It sells hardest into dental and veterinary practices and reports processing over $1 billion a year. What holds it back is everything around the pricing: no BBB profile at all, three Trustpilot reviews and all of them hostile, no published address or founding year, and public pages that contradict each other about where surcharging is even lawful.

The same model through Nadapayments' virtual terminal, which is included at no extra cost with a terminal rental. Note that surcharging rules apply identically online, including the requirement to disclose before the transaction and itemise on the receipt.

Not published anywhere on the site. For a provider whose whole pitch is 'sell $100, see $100', the absence of a settlement timetable is a real omission — ask for the funding schedule and the batch cut-off in writing before you sign.

★ 2.8 trustpilotRead review →

Gravity Payments

ISO

B+

A Seattle merchant services company founded in 2004, best known outside the industry for setting a $70,000 minimum salary in 2015, and better known inside it for doing two unfashionable things well: publishing a flat rate on its own website, and showing interchange and assessments at cost with its own markup as a separate line on the statement. Its formal complaint record is the cleanest of any provider we have reviewed at this size — one BBB complaint in three years against an A+ rating held since 2005. The two things to weigh against that are a markup that independent auditors have found higher than competing quotes, and a 2025 data breach at a third-party vendor that exposed Social Security numbers and banking details for 22,278 people and is now the subject of a proposed class action.

Not published. Card-not-present and software-integrated transactions fall outside the published flat rate and are quoted individually on Gravity's customised plan, which is interchange-plus.

Not published as a specific schedule. Gravity markets 'fast funding' and a separate financing product, Gravity Capital, but does not state a settlement timetable on its public pages. Ask for the funding schedule and the batch cut-off in writing and confirm both before you sign — a provider that publishes its rate should be able to publish this too.

★ 4 trustpilotRead review →

Verifone

C+

The terminal company that became a payments company. Verifone has been making card-reading hardware since 1981 and is the device behind a very large share of the world's checkout counters, but the merchant-facing business it has assembled around that hardware — Verifone Payments acquiring, plus the 2Checkout platform it bought in 2020 — is a much weaker story. Its US BBB profile carries an F for failing to answer complaints, its own .com Trustpilot page sits at 1.5 out of 5, and no acquiring rate is published anywhere. The only prices Verifone publishes are 2Checkout's, and those are merchant-of-record rates for selling software, not merchant-account rates.

The one place Verifone publishes a number is 2Checkout, its merchant-of-record platform for selling software and digital goods. As of 26 August 2026 the published plans are 2Sell at 3.5% + $0.35 per successful sale, 2Subscribe at 4.5% + $0.45 per successful sale, 2Monetize at "tailored pricing", and 4Enterprise at custom pricing. Note that 2Monetize used to carry a published headline rate and no longer does — older third-party pages still quote a 6.0% + $0.50 figure that 2Checkout's own pricing page no longer shows. These are merchant-of-record rates, which bundle global tax and regulatory compliance and are not comparable to a merchant-account discount rate.

2Checkout's published plan comparison lists a weekly payout period on all three self-serve plans, with payouts available in USD, GBP and EUR and other currencies on request. Verifone Payments does not publish a funding timetable.

★ 1.5 trustpilotRead review →

Tilled

A Boulder, Colorado company that sells payments infrastructure to software companies rather than merchant accounts to businesses. Tilled claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service: a software vendor gets the economics of being a payment facilitator — a share of the processing revenue on every transaction its customers make — without taking on the registration, underwriting and compliance burden of actually becoming one. It is one of the very few companies in this catalogue that publishes its own prices in public, which is the main reason it grades where it does.

Tilled does not set a fixed merchant rate — the software platform does, and keeps a share of the margin. Tilled's own revenue calculator uses 2.9% + $0.30 with no monthly account fee as the assumed price to the end merchant and 2.27% + $0.15 as the assumed partner cost. Those are illustrative assumptions on Tilled's own pricing page, not a quote; your actual buy rate depends on your volume and mix.

Not published. Tilled does not state a settlement timetable for merchants onboarded through its platform, and payout timing is one of the things a software platform will need to be able to answer for its own customers — so establish it before you build.

Expert grade BRead review →

Priority Commerce

ISO

A genuinely large US payments and banking company that most merchants have never heard of, because for twenty years it sold almost entirely through ISOs and software partners rather than under its own name. Founded in Georgia in 2005 as Priority Payment Systems, it listed on NASDAQ as PRTH in 2018 and now reports 1.8 million customer accounts and over $150 billion of annual volume. It publishes no rates, no contract length and no termination fee, and its BBB complaint file — 37 in three years, 21 of them closed in the last twelve months — is dominated by billing that continued after merchants believed they had cancelled.

Not published. Priority's merchant services page markets fee-based solutions heavily — cash discounting, convenience fees, service fees and surcharging — which is a route to pushing cost onto the cardholder rather than lowering it. Check your state's surcharging rules and your card-network obligations before agreeing to any of it.

Priority markets same-day funding as a headline merchant-services capability on its own site. Eligibility criteria, cut-off times and any premium for it are not published — confirm all three in writing, because same-day funding is commonly conditional on batch time and account standing.

Expert grade B-Read review →

Fortis

An embedded-payments specialist that sells to software platforms first and merchants second. Fortis plugs card acceptance into ERP and business software — Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage — and is registered as both a payment facilitator and an ISO for several banks, including KeyBank and Fifth Third. It took a growth recapitalisation from Audax Private Equity alongside existing investor Lovell Minnick in March 2025. It publishes no pricing at all, and the third-party sources describing its contract terms flatly contradict each other, which is the single most important thing to know before you sign.

Not published. Fortis's proposition to software platforms is payments monetisation — the platform earns a share of the processing revenue — so the rate a merchant sees is often set in part by the software vendor, not by Fortis alone. Ask your software provider who sets the rate and what their share of it is.