38 ranked
Independent Sales Organizations are registered with the card networks and sponsored by an acquiring bank. They can underwrite and price, and they hold your merchant agreement.
Ranked by grade, then by average category score. Equal grades share a position — where our evidence does not separate two providers, neither does this list.
A small, long-running ISO that publishes its entire interchange-plus margin, charges $20 a month, and imposes no contract and no early termination fee. The catch is fit, not conduct: it declines high-risk verticals, is uneconomic below a few thousand dollars a month, and supports merchants only during business hours.
CDGcommerce is a family-owned merchant services provider founded in 1998 by Chris and Laura West and based in Port Orange, Florida, operating as a registered ISO/MSP of Pinnacle Bank (dba Synovus Bank) and Citizens Bank, N.A. It is unusual among independent sales organisations for publishing its entire rate card: a flat-rate plan at 2.90% + $0.30 in person and 3.50% + $0.30 online with a $9.95 monthly fee, an interchange-plus plan at interchange + 0.30% + $0.10 retail, + 0.35% + $0.15 online and + 0.25% + $0.10 for non-profits, and a wholesale membership at $49 to $199 a month paid annually with per-transaction cents from 15¢ down to 6¢. Its own Quantum gateway and virtual terminal are free, there are no PCI, annual, statement or gateway fees, and — in the company's words — in more than twenty years it has never required a contract length or termination fee. It holds an A+ rating and BBB accreditation since 2020 with two complaints closed in three years, and it makes no attempt to serve merchants outside the United States or in adult, cannabis or telemarketing categories. The weaknesses are the ones that come with a small shop: a thin self-service knowledge base, a Dejavoo terminal that carries a $79-a-year update charge, and third-party reports of funding holds and terminations on riskier accounts.
Maverick Payments is a long-established payment processing provider offering a comprehensive suite of payment solutions for merchants, partners, and developers, though its reputation is mixed due to varied customer experiences.
LawPay is the payment processor built for law firms by AffiniPay, the Austin, Texas company Amy Porter founded in 2005 and which rebranded its corporate identity as 8am in August 2025; the product now trades as 8am LawPay. Launched in 2007, it is offered through all fifty state bar associations and more than sixty local and specialty bars, describes itself as the only ABA-recommended payment solution for the legal industry, and says more than 120,000 lawyers use it. Its reason for existing is trust accounting: card fees are debited from the firm's operating account rather than the client trust or IOLTA account, and chargebacks and refunds cannot be pulled from trust funds, which is what the bar rules require and what a general-purpose processor cannot promise. Pricing is published in full and interchange-free: $19 a month with no contract, 2.99% plus 30¢ on Visa, Mastercard and Discover, 3.90% plus 30¢ on American Express, 1% on eCheck, 5.95% on its Pay Later legal-fee financing, plus a $7.99 monthly card-brand pass-through fee and 1.75% on foreign cards. Since January 2024 eligible firms have had next-business-day funding on cards and eCheck, and since April 2026 8am has guaranteed it. 8am, LLC operates as an independent sales organization of Fifth Third Bank, Wells Fargo Bank, Synovus Bank and Fiserv Canada. The record is good: an A+ BBB rating with fourteen complaints in three years, and a Trustpilot profile that is 78% five-star. The costs are a card rate a tenth of a point above Stripe's, an Amex rate near four percent, and a pass-through fee that reviewers say catches firms unawares.
A Santa Barbara ISO that has been processing since 2000, sells month-to-month with no cancellation fee, and has zero complaints on file with the BBB. The reservation is pricing: its published numbers are all 'as low as', and third-party accounts of its monthly fee flatly contradict each other.
A Delaware ISO that publishes real interchange-plus margins — 0.25% and $0.10 retail, 0.20% and $0.09 restaurant, 0.35% and $0.10 e-commerce — on month-to-month terms with no termination fee, an A+ BBB record since 2011 and 4.6 on Trustpilot.
A Seattle merchant services company founded in 2004, best known outside the industry for setting a $70,000 minimum salary in 2015, and better known inside it for doing two unfashionable things well: publishing a flat rate on its own website, and showing interchange and assessments at cost with its own markup as a separate line on the statement. Its formal complaint record is the cleanest of any provider we have reviewed at this size — one BBB complaint in three years against an A+ rating held since 2005. The two things to weigh against that are a markup that independent auditors have found higher than competing quotes, and a 2025 data breach at a third-party vendor that exposed Social Security numbers and banking details for 22,278 people and is now the subject of a proposed class action.
Durango is a veteran, boutique high-risk payment processing specialist that serves as a trusted lifeline for businesses rejected by mainstream processors, but lacks enough reviews to make a confident assessment on the quality of the services.
Stax is a payments technology company founded in 2014 that partners with SaaS companies, ISOs, and SMBs to enable flexible, multi-channel payment processing and invoicing solutions, claiming a distinctive subscription-based pricing model with 0% interchange markup.
Corepay is a payment processor that specializes in tailored merchant accounts for high-risk industries with global service and a focus on customer support.
Paystone is a London, Ontario payment processor that calls itself Canada's largest bank-independent payment processor. It was founded in 2009 as Zomaron by Tarique Al-Ansari, who remains chief executive, rebranded to Paystone in November 2019 when it bought the Montreal gift-card and loyalty company DataCandy, and has since grown by acquisition — NiceJob in 2021, Canadian Payment Services in 2022 and the TSXV-listed loyalty firm Ackroo, for about C$21 million, in 2025 — on the back of roughly C$99 million raised in 2021, including C$30 million (about US$23.8 million) from Crédit Mutuel Equity. Its website says it serves more than 38,000 business locations and processes over $10 billion a year. The offer is interchange-plus with published starting points: in-person credit from 1.26% + 5¢ and debit from 5¢ a transaction on a $5-a-month merchant account, online credit from 2.27% + 25¢ on a $15-a-month gateway, a $99 setup fee, no locked-in contract, no cancellation fee and next-business-day deposits. Terminals range from the Ingenico Desk/5000 and Move/5000 to Clover Flex, Mini and Station Duo, and the processing is sold alongside its own DataCandy gift and loyalty programs and NiceJob review software. It is a registered MSP/ISO of U.S. Bank's Canadian branch and Elavon and of Wells Fargo Bank's US and Canadian branches, and a partner of Global Payments Direct and First Data Canada. The complaint record is small — third-party review sites count a handful of BBB complaints, mostly about terminal-rental billing and cancellation timing — and the company's BBB profile is currently under review. 'As low as' pricing means the real rate is a quote.
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.
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.
A Texas high-risk specialist with fast underwriting, an A+ BBB rating and an unusually clean complaint record. The catch is a quote-only rate card and a $495 early termination fee on high-risk agreements.
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.
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.
A long-established California high-risk specialist with an A+ BBB rating, accreditation since 2012 and an unusually light complaint record. The trade-offs are tiered, quote-only pricing at the expensive end of the market and multi-year contracts with early termination fees up to $595.
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.
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.
One of the oldest specialty merchant account providers in the United States — writing accounts for adult, CBD, firearms, credit repair, online pharmacy, gambling, telemedicine and travel since the early 1990s. It holds a BBB A+ and has been accredited since 2011, with 15 complaints in the last three years — low for this segment, but not the near-empty file some reviews suggest, and almost all of them are about reserve funds being held. Three things to know: it publishes no pricing at all, it holds reserves that merchants say run into six figures, and it is now a North brand, so a quote from Humboldt and a quote from North American Bancard are not two independent quotes.
SignaPay is an independent sales organization in Irving, Texas, best known for PayLo, its dual-pricing program that shows a cash price and a card price at the point of sale so the card cost lands on the customer who chose to pay by card. It has held BBB accreditation since 2008 and an A+ rating, but it publishes no rates, and third-party reviewers consistently describe three-year agreements with auto-renewal and an early termination fee.
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.
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.
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.
A 2007-vintage Utah merchant services provider that spent years as one of the better-regarded small-business ISOs, rebranded to pmtbox, raised $15 million in 2026, and repositioned around enterprise e-commerce. The track record is real; the offering a small merchant would be buying today is much less clear than it was.
Deluxe Merchant Services is the card-acquiring arm of Deluxe Corporation, the Minneapolis company founded in 1915 whose largest product line is still printing checks (32.4% of 2025 revenue) and which now earns 18.7% of its revenue from merchant processing. The business is First American Payment Systems of Fort Worth, Texas, founded in 1992 and bought by Deluxe for $960 million in June 2021, plus Celero Commerce, bought for about $625 million on 31 July 2026; together they process roughly $70 billion a year for around 210,000 merchants as a registered ISO of Fifth Third Bank, which Deluxe says makes it one of the ten largest non-bank acquirers in the United States. The scale, the listed parent and 24/7 support are real advantages. Against them: Deluxe publishes no rates, First American's model is tiered pricing on a three-year auto-renewing agreement with an early-termination fee that third-party reviewers put at up to $495, and in July 2022 First American settled a Federal Trade Commission action over hidden exit fees and unauthorised withdrawals for $4.9 million in refunds.
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.
A sales organisation with an unusually good promise and an unusually poor paper trail. Leap Payments sells interchange-plus pricing to every customer and attaches a Lifetime Rate Lock: its own processing, authorization and monthly account fees will not rise for the life of the account, with interchange itself passing through at cost in both directions. That is a better structure than most small merchants are offered, and the company has real standing behind it — it was named the number one MSP/ISO in Elavon's Western Region for merchant activations at Elavon's 2019 conference. The trouble is that you cannot verify anything else. No rate, no markup, no monthly fee and no contract term is published. Sources disagree on whether the agreement is month-to-month with no early termination fee or a three-year term with a $295 exit fee. Its own site says it is a sales office for WorldPay, an FIS Global company — a description stale on two counts by 2026 — while independent reviewers describe it as a registered ISO and MSP of Elavon. And the Better Business Bureau, which the company's marketing history leans on, currently shows no rating at all.
Qualpay is a San Mateo, California payments company that sells a merchant account and its own payment gateway as a single product, so one account covers online checkout, a virtual terminal, recurring billing, invoicing and text-to-pay, ACH and in-person terminals, with one set of reports running from authorisation to deposit. It was incorporated in October 2013, launched its platform in 2014 and was founded by payments-industry veterans, and its leadership team comes largely from BA Merchant Services and Merchant e-Solutions; Craig Gass has been chief executive since at least 2015. It is a registered ISO of its sponsor bank, which is now Pinnacle Bank, a Tennessee bank, doing business as Synovus Bank: Synovus took a 60% stake and three of five board seats on 1 June 2023, Synovus combined with Pinnacle Financial Partners on 1 January 2026, and Synovus Bank merged into Pinnacle Bank the next day; Pinnacle's filings still list the 60% holding as of March 2026. The merchant agreement is signed by Qualpay, the bank and the merchant, and runs for three years with an early-termination fee equal to your average monthly Qualpay fees multiplied by the months left, with a $150 minimum. Qualpay publishes no rates at all as of September 2026; pricing is quoted after a free statement audit it calls the Savings Challenge. Qualpay says card payments take two to three days to fund. In recent years Qualpay has concentrated on propane and heating-oil dealers, waste haulers, utilities, nonprofits and B2B sellers, and it says its energy-sector volume passed $1 billion in the first quarter of 2025. The main blemish on its record is a 2020 Federal Trade Commission settlement over payment processing for the MOBE business-coaching scheme, which permanently bars it from processing for business-coaching and money-making-method sellers, permanently requires it to screen and monitor its riskier card-not-present clients, and imposes 15 years of compliance reporting and recordkeeping.
A genuinely large US payments and banking company that most merchants have never heard of, because for twenty years it sold almost entirely through ISOs and software partners rather than under its own name. Founded in Georgia in 2005 as Priority Payment Systems, it listed on NASDAQ as PRTH in 2018 and now reports 1.8 million customer accounts and over $150 billion of annual volume. It publishes no rates, no contract length and no termination fee, and its BBB complaint file — 37 in three years, 21 of them closed in the last twelve months — is dominated by billing that continued after merchants believed they had cancelled.
A November 2025 rebrand of Electronic Merchant Systems, a Cleveland processor trading since 1988 and now owned by private equity. The new brand publishes real sample rates and funds next business day, which is progress. The complaint record underneath it has not reset, and the catches are in the footnotes rather than the headline.
Payment Depot, now operating as "Payment Depot by Stax," is a California-based merchant services provider founded in 2013 that pioneered the subscription/interchange-plus pricing model for small businesses, but has experienced significant customer service and transparency issues since its 2021 acquisition by Stax.
A Miami Beach independent sales organization, incorporated in 2002 and bought by Fiserv in December 2022 for about $300 million — a fact almost no review of it mentions, and one that undercuts its own "we're not a broker or middleman" claim. It publishes headline rates, which is rare for an ISO, but they are qualified-tier rates on a tiered plan, and its Trustpilot score of 4.9 and its BBB customer-review average of 1.02 across 56 reviews describe two different companies.
Celero Commerce is a Tennessee payment and business-software company that grew quickly by acquisition and was itself acquired by Deluxe for $625 million in a deal that closed on 31 July 2026. It has genuine scale — Deluxe put the acquired book at more than 55,000 merchant relationships and 130 bank partners — but the Better Business Bureau currently declines to issue it a rating and has flagged a pattern of complaints, and merchants report cancellation fees the company does not publish.
A Fiserv-owned merchant services brand built around the CardPointe platform, sold almost entirely through independent sales agents and ISOs. The technology is capable — CardPointe covers in-store, online, mobile and virtual terminal, CardSecure handles tokenisation and point-to-point encryption, and Clover hardware comes with it. The commercial record is the problem. CardConnect paid $7.65 million in 2021 to settle a class action covering 110,875 merchants who said it charged fees their agreements never named, and in July 2024 a Pennsylvania medical practice filed a fresh proposed class action alleging the same conduct had resumed, citing a $199.99 annual compliance fee, a $215 security bundle fee and a $200 annual membership fee introduced in February 2024. Nothing about pricing is published, terms vary by whichever agent sells to you, and the recurring complaint on every public channel is how hard it is to leave.
Riverside Payments is an independent sales organisation in Vancouver, Washington, registered with the Better Business Bureau since 2014 and a registered ISO of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. of Concord, California. It sells merchant accounts to small and mid-sized US businesses through a field sales force, pairing card processing with point-of-sale hardware from Clover, Dejavoo, TouchBistro, Aldelo and NCR. Its pitch is built on two promises that recur throughout its marketing: free and secure point-of-sale or credit card machines, and help getting out of a contract with your existing processor. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms. The public record is where the difficulty lies: the BBB records 256 complaints against the company in the last three years, 71 of them closed in the last twelve months, with consistent themes of savings that did not materialise, difficulty cancelling, and equipment that turned out to be financed through a separate, non-cancelable 48-month third-party lease rather than supplied free.
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.
Merchant Lynx Services is a Florida independent sales organisation, operating from Palm Beach Gardens as the trading name of Groundhog Enterprises, Inc., which the Better Business Bureau records as having started in April 1999. It is a registered ISO/MSP of Esquire Bank, N.A. of Jericho, New York and a registered ISO of Deutsche Bank AG, New York, and it sells card processing, its own Lynx POS system, check guarantee, gift cards, digital check imaging and merchant cash advances to small and mid-sized businesses across retail, hospitality, healthcare, education, automotive and government. The company advertises itself as an Inc. 5000 business and claims a ranking of 21st among US acquirers. The terms behind that sales pitch are published on its own website and are unusually onerous: the merchant agreement runs an initial three-year term, renews automatically for successive three-year terms unless cancelled with 90 days' written notice, and carries a $495 early-termination fee that can be deducted straight from settlements. Equipment leases are separately non-cancelable. The BBB rates the business F and revoked its accreditation.