Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

Swipesum

Agent Office / Reseller

B

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

B

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

B-

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

B

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

B-

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

B-

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.

Zip

BNPL Network

B

Zip is the US buy-now-pay-later network formerly known as Quadpay, owned by the ASX-listed Zip Co Limited. Zip Co was founded in Sydney in 2013 by Larry Diamond and Peter Gray and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2015; the American business it now trades under is Quadpay, a New York company incorporated in August 2017 and bought by Zip in a deal announced in June 2020, approved by shareholders on 31 August 2020 and completed that September. For a merchant the offer is the familiar BNPL trade: let shoppers split a purchase into four instalments over six weeks, get paid up front, and hand the credit and non-payment risk to Zip. What separates Zip from the rest of the category is that it prints a price, and a settlement window to go with it. Its Standard plan is published on its own site at 5.9% plus 30 cents per transaction with no monthly or annual fee, where Afterpay, Klarna and most of the field quote nothing at all and negotiate every deal in private. It also publishes what most of the category will not: that it settles the merchant in full, minus its fees, within two to three business days, and where chargeback liability sits. That 5.9% is nonetheless the highest published headline rate in mainstream BNPL, and Zip's own FAQ confirms it is a floor rather than a ceiling. The parent is now solidly profitable — FY26, the year to 30 June 2026, brought A$16.7 billion of transaction volume, A$1.336 billion of revenue and A$116.4 million of statutory profit, with the US arm growing revenue more than 42% in local currency — but it has also exited Singapore, the United Kingdom and, in August 2026, New Zealand, and in May 2026 lost a unanimous High Court trade mark case in its home market — a loss it settled eight days later by acquiring the disputed mark from Firstmac, avoiding the rebrand the judgment otherwise required and taking on no further damages liability.

Sola

ISO

B

Sola is the brand Fidelity Payment Services and its Cardknox payment gateway have traded under since October 2024. The underlying business is old by payments standards — the Better Business Bureau records it as started on 1 December 1996, and Sola's own history says it began as a retail ISO agent for Heartland Payments before becoming a registered ISO with First Data in 2008, expanding into Canada in 2010, building the Cardknox gateway in 2013, being acquired by the private equity firm H.I.G. in 2017 and passing to PSG in a 2022 acquisition in which H.I.G. stayed on as a minority investor. It is headquartered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the rebrand announcement described it as serving tens of thousands of merchants across a range of industries. What distinguishes it from the crowd of merchant-services resellers is that it owns its gateway rather than renting one: Cardknox is Sola's own product, which is why the company can go after software platforms wanting to embed payments as convincingly as it goes after individual merchants. What it has in common with the crowd is that it publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms anywhere on its site. Its own footer discloses what it is — a registered Independent Sales Organization of Citizens Bank, N.A. and Elavon, Inc. — which is the most useful sentence on the website.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

PAR Technology

POS & Business Software

B

PAR Technology Corporation is a New York Stock Exchange company founded in 1968 in New Hartford, New York, originally as a defense contractor, and now a restaurant-technology business that sold its Government segment to Booz Allen Hamilton in 2024 to concentrate on it. Its cloud point of sale began life outside the company as Brink Software, a San Diego business PAR partnered with from 2011 and acquired in September 2014; rebadged PAR POS, it runs in what the company says is more than 140,000 restaurant locations, including large franchise estates such as Burger King and Papa Johns, and around it PAR sells loyalty and engagement, digital ordering, back-office software, hardware and its own payments product, PAR Pay. The payments proposition is unusual for a point-of-sale vendor and is the most interesting thing here: PAR Pay is deliberately gateway-agnostic — its own marketing says to pick your processor, your hands are never tied — with next-day funding as standard, EMV, NFC and EBT support, tip handling, chargeback tooling, P2PE and PCI compliance and machine-learning fraud scoring across more than 110 transaction signals. The business behind it is growing: second-quarter 2026 revenue of $133.4 million, up 19% year on year, with annual recurring revenue of about $338.0 million, up more than 17%. What PAR does not do is publish a price for any of it.