Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

Worldline

Payment Processor

B-

Europe's largest listed payments company and, since March 2026, one that no longer sells to North American merchants at all — it sold its North American subsidiaries, including Bambora North America, to Shift4. What remains is a Paris-headquartered acquirer and processor serving roughly 1.2 million merchants and financial institutions across Europe with about 13,400 staff. The last two years have been brutal: a June 2025 investigative report accused it of knowingly processing for prohibited and high-risk clients, Belgian prosecutors opened a money-laundering probe into its local unit, the shares fell more than 40%, and S&P cut the credit rating to junk in August 2025. The underlying acquiring business is real and licensed; the governance record and the balance sheet are why this is not a B.

TailoredPay

High-Risk Specialist

B-

A small Miami high-risk merchant account broker founded in 2019, whose whole proposition is placing US businesses that ordinary acquirers decline — adult, CBD, vape, lending, dating, telemedicine, travel, dropshipping and, more recently, prop trading firms. It publishes a real address, a named list of over a hundred verticals, gateway integrations with Authorize.net and NMI, and — unusually for this corner of the market — some indicative pricing on its own blog. What it does not have is much of a public record: 42 Trustpilot reviews, every single one of them five stars, no BBB profile we could find, and no named acquiring banks. The absence of complaints is not the same as evidence of good outcomes, and a spotless rating on a small sample deserves scepticism rather than credit.

Newtek Payments (NewtekOne)

Payment Processor

B-

The payments arm of NewtekOne, a Nasdaq-listed financial holding company that became a bank in January 2023 by acquiring National Bank of New York City and renaming it Newtek Bank, N.A. That makes it unusual among mid-market processors: the same company can hold your deposits, write your SBA loan, run your payroll, sell you insurance and process your cards. The payments business is real but not growing — $22.3 million of processing revenue in the first half of 2026, down from $24.0 million a year earlier — and it publishes no rates at all. The recurring merchant complaint is undisclosed fees and difficulty cancelling, and there is an old but serious regulatory matter on the record: a 2015 FTC settlement under which the Newtek processing entity paid $1.7 million over payments it handled for a robocall scheme.

Leaders Merchant Services

ISO

C+

A California merchant services reseller that is no longer an independent company: its own website footer reads 'Paysafe Payment Processing Solutions, LLC dba Leaders Merchant Services', the end point of a chain that ran from iPayment's 2017 acquisition to Paysafe's purchase of iPayment in June 2018. It sells through independent agents, quotes rates only after a sales call, and — according to consistent third-party reporting — puts merchants on three-year contracts that auto-renew and carry an early termination fee in the $250–$350 range. It holds an A+ from the BBB and is accredited there, but the customer-facing record is the opposite: 1.3 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 49 reviews, two-thirds of them one star, with the same three complaints repeating — quoted rates that did not match the contract, fees that appeared without warning, and accounts that kept billing after the merchant believed they had cancelled.

Cybersource

Payment Gateway

B

Visa's enterprise payment gateway, founded in 1994 in Silicon Valley and bought by Visa for about $2 billion in 2010. It is one of the largest gateways in the world — Cybersource's own marketing claims 14.3 billion transactions a year, connections to more than 200 acquirers and processors across 160-plus countries, and 99.999% uptime — and its Decision Manager fraud engine is genuinely among the best-regarded in the industry. What it does not do is publish a single price. Cybersource has no public rate card, no published gateway fee and no self-serve signup; every quote comes through a sales conversation or through whichever acquirer resells it to you. For a large merchant with a payments team that is normal. For anyone smaller, it is the main reason to look at its sister brand Authorize.net instead.

Xplor Pay

Payment Processor

B

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.

Payroc

Payment Processor

B

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.

PAYARC

Payment Processor

B-

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.

Nadapayments

ISO

B-

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.