Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

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.

Bolt

Gateway / Orchestration

C

Bolt Financial, Inc. is the one-click checkout company founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Ryan Breslow and Eric Feldman, which raised $355 million led by BlackRock in January 2022 at an $11 billion valuation. The product is a hosted checkout backed by a claimed network of more than 80 million US shoppers, the idea being that a returning Bolt account holder skips the form entirely, and the pricing is genuinely the most detailed and the most aggressive published in this market: a flat 2.5% plus 30 cents for processing, a $5 chargeback fee, 100% of fees returned on refunds, subscriptions and Checkout Everywhere free, and the statement that there are no lock-in commitments, ever. The problem is not the product sheet. It is the company. Bolt's valuation was reported as low as $300 million in 2024 secondary sales, down from $11 billion in January 2022; it has cut staff four times since 2022, most recently by roughly 30% in April 2026; it eliminated its entire human resources function; the founder left the chief executive role in 2022 and returned in March 2025; and trade reporting describes a company that has struggled to pay vendors. Two of its largest named customers sued it and settled. For a merchant, that is not background colour — the checkout is the least replaceable component in a store.

Basys Processing

ISO

B

Basys Processing is a privately held merchant-services company in Lenexa, Kansas, incorporated in March 2002 and run by its founder, Brad Oddo. Its own footer describes what it is more precisely than its marketing does: a registered Independent Sales Organization of Citizens Bank, N.A., KeyBank, N.A., PNC Bank, N.A. and Merrick Bank. In practice that means Basys sells, prices and supports merchant accounts that settle on partner rails, deploying Fiserv-family and PAX hardware alongside its own IQ Pro gateway, and it reaches most of its merchants through banks, credit unions, software platforms and professional associations rather than through cold outbound. The pitch is service rather than price: US-based in-house support that answers 99% of calls within three rings and resolves 90% of issues on the first, next-day funding, surcharging and cash-discount programs, ACH, recurring billing, QuickBooks and ERP integrations, and a healthcare practice that reaches as far as Epic. The complaint record is remarkably quiet for a company of 24 years — an A+ Better Business Bureau rating, accredited since March 2014, with essentially no complaint volume on file. The gap is the one its own pricing page opens: it is headed 'Total Pricing Transparency' and contains no prices.

Talus Pay

ISO

B-

Talus Pay is a Dallas merchant-services organisation trading as FPT Operating Company, LLC. The business dates to 2006, when it was founded in Dallas as Future Payment Technologies; it took the Talus Pay name in February 2019 following a trademark dispute, and has since consolidated its acquisitions under the master brand Talus. Its Better Business Bureau file records a business start date of 2 December 2016 and accreditation since 10 April 2017 — dates that reflect the current LLC's registration rather than the origin of the business. It has been a portfolio company of the private-equity firm A&M Capital Partners since 2017 and has grown largely by acquisition: Prolific Business Solutions in 2018, three add-on deals during 2019, and Jobox.ai together with Clarus Merchant Services in January 2024. The corporate structure is unusually layered even by ISO standards — AMCP Payments Intermediate Company LLC does business as Talus Pay, Talus Payments, LTD Merchant Services, MSP Consulting, Granite Payment Alliance, Philadelphia Processing, City National Bank Merchant Services and Merchant Bank Partners, and the group is a registered ISO or MSP of Pinnacle Bank dba Synovus Bank, Citizens Bank N.A., Elavon and Esquire Bank. Talus sells a proprietary gateway called Talus Connect, the ReadyPoint point-of-sale line, mobile acceptance, and — through a partnership with Ingenico announced in December 2025 — a hardware-free SoftPOS tap-to-pay product for North America. It holds an A+ BBB rating. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms anywhere.

Revolut Business

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Revolut Business is the merchant-acceptance arm of Revolut, the London fintech founded in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko. It is unusual in this directory for a simple reason: it publishes a complete rate card. A merchant can read, before speaking to anyone, that in-person domestic consumer Visa and Mastercard transactions cost 0.8% + £0.02, that the same cards online cost 1% + £0.20, that commercial and international cards cost 2.6% + £0.02 in person and 2.8% + £0.20 online, that a Revolut Terminal is £169 + VAT and a Lite Terminal £129 + VAT, and that a chargeback dispute resolved in the merchant's favour returns £15. Acceptance is a sub-account of a Revolut Business account rather than a separate merchant account with a separate provider, so settlement lands in the same balance the business already banks from, in as little as 24 hours. The important limit is geographic: Revolut has offered acquiring across the UK and continental Europe since 2020–21 — its own January 2021 announcement put the count at 29 European countries, a figure it has not refreshed since — and launched a full merchant-acquiring suite in Australia during 2026. It publishes no United States card-acceptance rates. In March 2026 Revolut exited the Bank of England's mobilisation phase and received a full UK banking licence, roughly twenty months after being granted one with restrictions in July 2024.

Nexi

Platform / Acquirer

B

Nexi S.p.A. is one of Europe's largest payments companies, headquartered in Milan and traded on Euronext Milan, and describes itself as Europe's PayTech. It was assembled through consolidation — most consequentially the merger with the Danish group Nets, completed on 1 July 2021, and the merger with the Italian rival SIA, effective 1 January 2022, which together were widely reported as creating the largest European paytech by EBITDA — and now runs three businesses: Merchant Solutions (acquiring and acceptance), Issuing Solutions (card issuing and processing for banks) and Digital Banking Solutions (clearing, open banking, ATM and network services). Adyen carries a far larger market value and Worldline has at times been described as Europe's largest acquirer by revenue, so "largest" depends on the measure — but the scale is not in doubt. In the first half of 2026 the group reported net revenues of €1,736 million, EBITDA of €870 million and merchant transactions of 10,225 million worth €423 billion, with Merchant Solutions accounting for roughly 56% of revenue. What a merchant will not find is a price. Nexi sells overwhelmingly through partner banks and through country brands rather than direct, so acceptance terms are set by whichever bank or channel signs the merchant, and there is no group rate card to compare. The company is also in transition at the top: in March 2026 it appointed Bernardo Mingrone, previously group chief financial officer and CEO of Nexi Payments, to succeed Paolo Bertoluzzo after a decade as chief executive, and the shares fell on the announcement.

Lavu

POS & Business Software

B-

Lavu is an Albuquerque restaurant technology company founded in 2010 by Andy Lim, and it has a genuine claim to being the first restaurant point-of-sale system built for the iPad. It raised a $15 million investment from Aldrich Capital Partners in 2015 — reported at the time as the largest Series A in New Mexico's history — and has since assembled a full restaurant stack around the till: a kitchen display system, online and contactless ordering, a dual-pricing (cash discount) programme, payroll, back office and its own payment processing under the name Lavu Pay. Through 2026 the company repositioned hard around Marty AI, an overnight analysis layer that reads point-of-sale, labour and inventory data and delivers a "Morning Deposit" briefing of recoverable cash to managers before service, published a comparative report on AI capabilities across seven major restaurant POS platforms in March 2026, and now markets itself as an intelligent financial operating system rather than a till. Independent reviewers place its plans at roughly $59, $129 and $279 a month with a three-year commitment; Lavu itself no longer publishes a pricing page.