Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

2.19% + 24p for UK consumer cards

Viva.com is a European payments company and licensed bank, headquartered in Athens, that sells card acceptance, a business account, cards and financing to small and medium businesses on one platform. It is unusual in two ways that matter to anyone comparing processors. The first is disclosure: where almost every acquirer in Europe quotes privately, Viva.com publishes a full price pack per country — acquiring rate, scheme pass-throughs, plan fees, dispute fees, investigation fees and cash-withdrawal charges, line by line, with an effective date stamped at the bottom. For UK consumer cards in September 2026 that pack quotes 1.69% for card-present with a 1p minimum per transaction, and 2.19% + 24p online. The second is its licence. Viva is not an intermediary reselling somebody else's acquiring: the group holds a Greek banking licence, acquired with Praxia Bank in 2020, alongside an e-money licence from the Bank of Greece, and it describes itself as Europe's first full tech bank for businesses, operating across 29 European countries. J.P. Morgan has owned 48.5% since December 2022, with the founders holding the balance — a stake that has also produced several years of shareholder litigation between the two.

Online rate

Payout

Real-time settlement, included on every plan

takepayments

ISO

takepayments is a Stockport-based reseller of card machines, online payments and POS systems to UK small businesses, and since June 2024 it has been a Global Payments company. It does not hold your merchant agreement: its own terms make clear that a customer enters a separate contract with an acquiring bank for the transaction processing, while takepayments supplies the terminal, the onboarding, the PCI compliance help and the support line. Two things stand out. The first is its service record, which is the strongest of any provider reviewed on this site by volume: 4.8 on Trustpilot across 66,994 reviews, 94% of them five-star, with more than 6,000 arriving in the last twelve months. The second is that it publishes no prices whatsoever. Rates, standing charges and terminal costs are all quoted by a field consultant after a visit, on a twelve-month minimum term that then runs monthly. The company is older than its name suggests: Companies House records the entity as incorporated on 14 September 1995 and shows it trading as Targeted Transaction Managed Services, then Alphyra UK, then Payzone UK, before taking the takepayments name in December 2019.

Pricing clarity: 1.5
Feature set: 3.5
Ease of use: 4.5

Paystand

Bank / A2A Payments

Paystand is a California B2B payments and accounts-receivable company, founded in 2013 by Jeremy Almond and Scott Campbell, built on a premise that inverts how this industry normally charges: you pay a flat monthly subscription rather than a percentage of every transaction. Its own bank-to-bank network carries payments between businesses at no transaction fee, while card and ACH acceptance are resold at what it describes as pre-negotiated wholesale rates, and the software sits on top automating invoicing, collections and reconciliation against ERP systems like NetSuite. It bought the spend-management company Teampay in April 2024, which took it into accounts payable as well, and it says the combined network now touches more than a million businesses with over $20bn in payment volume processed. In April 2026 it launched USDb, a stablecoin backed one-to-one by dollar reserves and issued on two Bitcoin layers — a genuine strategic bet, and the thing most likely to decide whether a given finance team sees Paystand as forward-looking or as a risk it does not need.

Pricing clarity: 1.5
Feature set: 4.0
Ease of use: 3.0

Swipesum

Agent Office / Reseller

Swipesum is a St. Louis payments advisory founded in 2016 by brothers Michael and Stephen Seaman, and it sells something most companies in this market do not: advice about the processor you already have. Its core work is the statement audit — running a merchant's monthly processing statement through its own software, called Staitment, to separate interchange from processor markup, identify what is negotiable, and quantify what is being overpaid. From there it will renegotiate with the incumbent, run a competitive process across a network it describes as more than seventy providers, and handle the implementation. It describes itself as a fractional chief payments officer rather than an independent sales organisation, and unusually for this corner of the industry it publishes actual prices: the evaluation and implementation service is free, enterprise consulting starts at $50 an hour, and a single statement analysis is $75. It claims to have analysed over $300.5 billion in processing volume since 2016, and it has made the Inc. 5000 three years running — No. 729 in 2023, No. 666 in 2024, and again in 2025.

Pricing clarity: 4.5
Feature set: 3.5
Ease of use: 4.0

Sunbit

BNPL Network

Sunbit is a Los Angeles financing company, founded in 2016, that puts pay-over-time options at the counter of everyday service businesses rather than at an online checkout. Its natural habitat is the unplanned bill: a $1,400 transmission repair, a root canal, a dog that swallowed something it should not have. The technology and the servicing are Sunbit's; the credit itself is not. Loans and the Sunbit Card are issued by Transportation Alliance Bank, trading as TAB Bank, which is the lender of record. Merchants are told customers can finance totals from $60 to $20,000, that roughly 90% of applicants are approved, and that the application takes about thirty seconds at the point of service. Sunbit's own pages variously describe a network of over 30,000 and over 40,000 locations, concentrated in dentistry, auto service, veterinary care, optical, powersports and general healthcare. The consumer record is unusually good for this category — 4.7 out of 5 across 3,977 Trustpilot reviews and an A+ BBB rating, accredited since 2020 — and Sunbit says it has now made the Forbes Fintech 50 three years running and the Inc. 5000 five. What it does not do is publish what it charges the merchant.

Pricing clarity: 1.5
Feature set: 3.5
Ease of use: 4.5

Splitit

BNPL Network

Splitit is an Atlanta-headquartered installment provider that works differently from every other name in buy-now-pay-later. There is no loan, no application and no new account: the shopper pays with a credit card they already hold, Splitit places an authorization on the card for the full purchase amount, and the balance is charged down in monthly or bi-weekly instalments against that same card's existing credit line. Because no credit is being extended, nobody is declined for credit — Splitit advertises approval above 85% against 30–40% for conventional BNPL, and an average order value above $1,000 against roughly $250. The company began life as PayItSimple, rebranded in 2015, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, then took a $50m investment commitment from Motive Partners, delisted from the ASX and went private in December 2023. It is led by chief executive Nandan Sheth and registered in the United States as Splitit USA Inc., NMLS #2314339. Merchant pricing is quoted rather than published, across four plan tiers whose consumer APR ranges from 0% to 35.99% depending on which side absorbs the cost.

Pricing clarity: 2.0
Feature set: 3.5
Ease of use: 3.5

Payabli

Payfac / Aggregator

Payabli is a Miami embedded-payments company — legally Centavo, Inc., trading as Payabli — founded in 2020 by William Corbera and Joseph Elias Phillips, who run it as co-chief executives. It does not sell merchant accounts to businesses. It sells payments infrastructure to software companies, so that a property-management system, an HOA portal, a school-district platform or a field-service tool can take payments inside its own product and earn on them, without going through the cost and compliance burden of becoming a payment facilitator itself. The stack is organised as Pay In for acceptance and merchant onboarding, Pay Out for payables, and Pay Ops for the operational layer around both, with a low-code builder called Creator and an AI feature set branded Amigo layered on top. The company is a registered payment facilitator of PNC Bank and Huntington Bank and a registered ISO/MSP of Merrick Bank — an unusually clear disclosure for this part of the market. It raised a $28m Series B in June 2025 led by Fika Ventures and QED Investors, bringing total funding to about $60m, and reported 7x year-on-year revenue growth, more than 50,000 merchants on the platform and billions of dollars in live processing volume.

Pricing clarity: 2.0
Feature set: 4.0
Ease of use: 4.0

Fullsteam

Payfac / Aggregator

Fullsteam is a payments and vertical-software holding company founded in 2018 and headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, with a second base in Atlanta. Its model is unusual enough to explain before anything else: rather than selling merchant accounts directly, Fullsteam buys the industry-specific software small businesses already run on — association management, self-storage, field services, healthcare practice management, automotive, wine, hospitality — and embeds its own payment processing into those products. It registered as a Visa payment facilitator in 2019, and by its own account it now employs more than 2,100 people and serves over 60,000 customers, having acquired dozens of software businesses since 2018. For a merchant, that means Fullsteam is usually not a company you chose. It is the company that started processing your payments after the software vendor you did choose was acquired. The product side of that bargain is real: modern embedded payments, one support and reporting layer, and back-office scale a small software vendor could not fund. The commercial side is where the criticism sits. Fullsteam publishes no pricing at all, and a payments-audit firm has documented five rate increases since May 2023, most recently in April 2026.

Pricing clarity: 1.5
Feature set: 4.0
Ease of use: 3.0

Aeropay

Bank / A2A Payments

Seconds via RTP or FedNow; Same-Day ACH otherwise.

Aeropay is a Chicago pay-by-bank company founded in 2017 by Daniel Muller, and it sells something genuinely different from the merchant accounts most of this site covers: it moves money directly between bank accounts over ACH and the instant rails rather than over the card networks. The business is built around four pieces — Aerosync for connecting a customer's bank account, Pay for taking the debit, Payout for pushing money back out, and Guard for risk — and it is sold to industries where cards are either expensive, awkward or refused outright. That history is the important context. Aeropay found its first real traction in cannabis dispensaries, where card acceptance is a persistent problem, and then moved hard into online gaming; by August 2024 gaming was around 80% of revenue. It raised a $20m Series B in May 2024, led by Group 11, and has assembled a credible list of banking and network partners since — Cross River, MVB Bank, Regent Bank, a Worldpay collaboration for gaming, a Skipify checkout partnership and a Jack Henry integration announced in June 2026. The company publishes no pricing at all, and its consumer-facing record is the problem: the Better Business Bureau rates it F, with a pattern-of-complaints alert and complaints about delayed transfers and unresponsive support.

Payout