Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

Sezzle

Payment Processor

B-

Sezzle is a Minneapolis buy-now-pay-later provider founded in 2016; Charlie Youakim, Paul Paradis and Killian Brackey are the co-founders named most consistently, though accounts of the full founding team differ. It began as a next-business-day ACH product and pivoted to instalments in 2017, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on 30 July 2019, began trading on Nasdaq as SEZL on 17 August 2023 and left the ASX in January 2024. For the quarter ended 30 June 2026 it reported gross merchandise volume of $1.3 billion, up 37.9% year on year, total revenue of $149.7 million, up 51.7%, and net income of $40.8 million. For a merchant the bargain is the standard BNPL one but unusually cleanly stated: the shopper pays Sezzle a down payment, Sezzle pays you the full order value less your merchant rate, and Sezzle then carries both the fraud risk and the repayment risk for the six weeks that follow. What Sezzle does not do is tell you what that costs. There is no published merchant rate anywhere on its site — the fee is in the agreement you sign — and there are three separate ancillary charges most merchants only meet after signing.

QuickBooks Payments (Intuit)

Payment Processor

B

QuickBooks Payments is Intuit's card and bank-payment service, sold as an add-on to QuickBooks Online rather than as a standalone merchant account. Intuit was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California; money movement is provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and the card acquiring itself runs through JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. and Paymentech, LLC under the commercial entity merchant agreement Intuit publishes. Rates are published in full and, as of the figures Intuit dated 30 April 2026, are 2.5% for in-person payments, 2.99% for invoices and other card and digital-wallet transactions, 1% for ACH bank payments, 3.5% for keyed cards, and 2.99% for buy-now-pay-later through Affirm. There is no monthly fee for Payments itself, no minimum and no long-term contract. The defining trade-off is reconciliation: nothing else puts card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo and Affirm volume straight into your books with no matching step, and nothing else in this price band has quite the same reputation for freezing deposits.

PNC Merchant Services

Payment Processor

C+

PNC Merchant Services is the card-acceptance arm of PNC Bank, and PNC describes it on its own site as an alliance between the bank and Fiserv — PNC owns the customer relationship and support, Fiserv provides the processing and the Clover hardware. It publishes flat rates, which most bank programmes do not: 2.60% plus $0.10 for a swiped, dipped or tapped card and 3.45% plus $0.15 for online, telephone or manually keyed transactions, with next-business-day funding on Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express when the money lands in a qualifying PNC business checking account. What it does not publish is the rest of the agreement — the monthly and annual account fees, the term length, and the liquidated-damages provision that applies if you leave early. That gap is not academic: in November 2021 PNC Merchant Services agreed to a settlement of up to $14.5 million to resolve two class actions brought by merchants over annual fees, early-termination fees and paper statement fees.

Melio

Payment Processor

B-

Melio is a US business bill-pay and accounts-payable platform founded in 2018 by Matan Bar, Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz, headquartered in New York with an R&D centre in Tel Aviv. It is not a card acquirer: instead of helping you take money from customers, it moves money out to your suppliers, letting you pay any vendor by ACH, cheque, wire or card even when that vendor accepts none of those, and syncing the result into QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite. Xero announced its acquisition of Melio in June 2025 and completed it on 15 October 2025 for US$2.5 billion upfront in cash and equity, with up to a further US$0.5 billion payable over three years. Xero's announcement put Melio at 80,000 customers, more than US$30 billion of payments processed in FY25 and US$153 million of FY25 revenue. Melio publishes its entire fee schedule, which is rare in this market and the single strongest thing about it. Against that sits a Better Business Bureau rating of F and a large, consistent body of complaints about accounts suspended mid-payment with funds already in transit.

CardFlight (SwipeSimple)

Payment Gateway

B-

CardFlight is a New York software company, founded in 2013 by Derek Webster, whose product SwipeSimple is the payment-acceptance app a great many American small businesses use without ever hearing the name CardFlight. That is by design: CardFlight has historically sold through banks, merchant acquirers and independent sales organisations, which rebrand or resell SwipeSimple to their own merchants, and the company says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have selected it as their preferred small-business acceptance product. It reports more than 125,000 small businesses on the platform as of August 2026. Alongside that channel business it now sells direct, as SwipeSimple Connect, with fully published pricing: 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 10 cents keyed, no monthly, annual, batch, statement or PCI fees, no contract, a $49 mobile reader and a $299 smart terminal. WestView Capital Partners took a growth stake in October 2024.

Payline Data

Payment Processor

B

Payline Data is a Chicago merchant account provider that publishes its whole interchange-plus rate card on its home page: interchange plus 0.35% and 10 cents under $50,000 of monthly volume, sliding to interchange plus 0.15% and 8 cents above $1 million. That alone puts it in a small minority of US processors. It advertises no application fee, no cancellation fee and no term length, does not charge for PCI compliance, and funds next day. It is a registered ISO of Wells Fargo Bank N.A. and Fifth Third Bank N.A., says it serves more than 20,000 merchants, and takes high-risk business including nutraceuticals, subscriptions, firearms, CBD and adult. The complication a reader should know before signing is ownership: Payline was bought by Pineapple Payments in October 2017, and Fiserv bought Pineapple in May 2021, so Payline has been a Fiserv brand for five years. Nothing on Payline's own site says so.

Nayax

Payment Processor

B-

Nayax is an Israeli payments and commerce platform built for unattended retail — vending machines, kiosks, car washes, laundromats, amusement machines, coffee service and, increasingly, EV charging. Founded in 2005 by Yair Nechmad and David Ben Avi and headquartered in Herzliya, it listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in May 2021 and on Nasdaq in September 2022. In the second quarter of 2026 it reported revenue of $122.6 million, up 28.2%, on total transaction value of $2.056 billion across 815 million transactions, 1.553 million managed and connected devices and 125,400 customers, at a blended take rate of 2.62%. Its US retail plan is published at $99 a month with no transaction fee on the first $5,000 of monthly volume. Against that: a February 2025 consent decree with the Israeli Competition Authority over its OTI acquisition, a July 2026 cloud security incident, 79 BBB complaints in three years and a 2.2-star Trustpilot.

Electronic Payments

Payment Processor

B

Electronic Payments, Inc. — usually EPI — is a Calverton, New York merchant acquirer founded on 20 May 2000 by Michael Nardy while he was a student at Boston College. It is one of the few mid-sized US acquirers that runs its own stack rather than reselling somebody else's: Cygma, launched in 2023, is EPI's own authorization and clearing platform, and Exatouch, ProCharge, eGiftSolutions and the Vault gateway are in-house products. The company says it processes more than $26.5 billion a year across 60,000+ merchant partnerships and 486 million transactions, and calls itself the 23rd largest US acquirer. It bought UK-based Handpoint in August 2025, adding roughly 100 ISV integrations, 18,000 connected devices and more than $2 billion of annual volume plus reach into Canada, the UK and over 20 EEA markets. Its BBB file is unusually clean — A+, accredited since 2010, four complaints in three years. It publishes no pricing whatsoever.

dLocal

Payment Processor

B-

dLocal is an emerging-markets payment platform founded in 2016 in Montevideo, Uruguay by Sergio Fogel and Andres Bzurovski, and listed on Nasdaq since June 2021 as DLO. It exists to solve one problem: a global business that wants to sell in Brazil, India, Nigeria or Indonesia has to accept Pix, boleto, GCash, M-Pesa, UPI and local cards, and settle in currencies with capital controls. dLocal covers 60+ countries and more than 1,000 payment methods through a single integration, and counts Amazon, Shopify, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Shein and Tripadvisor among its merchants. In 2025 it processed $41 billion of total payment volume, up 60%, on revenue of $1.09 billion and gross profit of $403 million. It is also the most legally scrutinised company in this category: two Muddy Waters short reports in late 2022, a reported Argentine government investigation in 2023, a New York IPO-disclosure class action that was dismissed and whose dismissal was upheld on appeal in April 2026, and a separate federal securities case in the Eastern District of New York that is still live.