Payment Processor Reviews

Teya

Platform / Acquirer

B

Teya is a London-headquartered payments and business-banking company founded in 2019 as SaltPay by Ali Mazanderani and Eduardo Pontes, renamed in April 2023, and backed by investors including Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital and Michael Spencer — total funding is reported at about $845 million by data providers and $1.1 billion by The Business of Payments. It grew by acquisition — Iceland's Borgun in 2020, the UK's RMS Group in 2022 and the Czech ePOS company Storyous among them — and now sells to small businesses in nine European markets, the UK, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain, with Spain and Italy launched commercially in February 2026. In the UK the offer is a Teya Pro or Teya Lite card machine from £14.99 a month with a lifetime warranty, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, online payments, and a free e-money Business Account that card takings settle into next working day as standard, every day including weekends and bank holidays as an option, or in seconds with Instant Settlements. Rates are quoted rather than published — the pricing page says there is no standard price list, the card-machine page says fees start at 1.59% — and using an outside bank account instead of Teya's adds 0.10% to every transaction. Teya Solutions Ltd is an electronic money institution authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (reference 978181), so the account is safeguarded rather than FSCS-protected. Its UK Trustpilot profile is 4.4 from about 1,500 reviews, 82% five-star and 15% one-star, and the one-star reviews are about held funds and unreturned calls.

myPOS

Platform / Acquirer

B

myPOS is a London-headquartered payments company founded in 2012 by Christo Georgiev and owned since February 2024 by the private-equity firm Advent International in a deal reported at around €500 million, after which the founder exited and Mario Shiliashki, formerly of Mastercard and PayPal, became chief executive. It sells card machines outright — the myPOS Go 2 at £39, Flex at £59, Go Combo at £169 and Ultra at £179, all excluding VAT — with no monthly fee, and settles every card payment instantly into a free myPOS e-money business account with a Mastercard business card, a model it says it pioneered in 2014. The UK rate card is published for businesses under £10,000 a month: 1.10% + 7p on domestic consumer cards, 2.20% + 7p on EEA consumer cards, 2.45% + 7p on American Express and 2.85% + 7p on everything else in person, and 1.30% + 15p domestic, 2.50% + 15p Amex and 2.90% + 15p other cards online; larger businesses get a custom quote. UK, Gibraltar and Swiss services are provided by myPOS Payments Ltd, an electronic money institution authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (reference 900826), and the group says it serves more than 400,000 merchants in over 30 countries with 15 physical stores, up from the 170,000 small businesses Reuters reported when the sale was agreed. Its Trustpilot profile is 4.2 from nearly 22,000 reviews, 70% five-star and 13% one-star, and the one-star reviews are about unexplained application rejections, slow deliveries and support that is hard to reach.

CDGcommerce

ISO

B+

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.

Zeller

Platform / Acquirer

B+

Zeller is a Melbourne payments and business-banking company founded in 2020 by Ben Pfisterer, who had led Square's Asia-Pacific team, and Dominic Yap, and launched in May 2021. It sells an EFTPOS terminal outright — the Zeller Terminal 1x and the newer Zeller Terminal 2, both listed at A$99 on promotion in September 2026 — with no monthly rental, no lock-in contract and a flat 1.4% on every in-person card, American Express included, falling to 1.2% when payments run through its free Zeller POS software. Every merchant gets a Zeller Transaction Account and debit card at no cost, with card takings settled into it nightly and available the next business day at an outside bank. It also offers invoices, a virtual terminal, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, corporate expense cards and, from April 2026, a UK operation priced at 1.3% on domestic Visa and Mastercard. The company reached a valuation above A$1 billion ten months after launch on the back of a A$100 million Series B in March 2022 and says more than 100,000 Australian businesses use it. Zeller Australia Pty Ltd holds an Australian financial services licence and is a principal member of Mastercard; merchant funds are held in a segregated account at Cuscal rather than in a bank deposit. The pricing is among the simplest in the Australian market and the hardware is well regarded; the recurring complaint is the one every fintech acquirer attracts — funds frozen pending documents, with slow answers.

Wix Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Wix Payments is the native payment processor inside Wix, the website builder founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan and listed on Nasdaq since 2013. It lets a Wix merchant accept cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and instalment plans from Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna without connecting a third-party processor, with payments, payouts, refunds and disputes managed from the Wix dashboard. Wix's own help centre says it is available in fifteen countries and, in its terms, that the processing underneath is handled by Adyen and Stripe in most regions and by Pagar.me in Brazil — so this is a payment facilitator layered on other acquirers rather than a new one. US pricing is published in full: 2.9% plus 30¢ on standard cards online, 3.7% plus 30¢ on American Express, 2.6% flat on the Wix POS hardware, 2.6% plus 20¢ for Tap to Pay, 3.5% plus 30¢ keyed, 6% plus 30¢ on the instalment options, a 1.5% cross-border surcharge and a $15 chargeback fee. Payouts run daily, weekly or monthly and reach a US bank in three to five business days after a two-to-five-day pending period. The case for it is one dashboard, a competitive in-person rate and a real hardware line; the case against is that online it costs exactly what Stripe charges directly, Amex is expensive, Wix's documented reserve and hold policy gives it wide latitude over your money, and support is chat and callback only.

LawPay (8am, formerly AffiniPay)

ISO

B+

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.

Squarespace Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Squarespace Payments is the native payment processor inside Squarespace, the New York website builder founded by Anthony Casalena in 2003 and taken private by Permira in October 2024 for about $7.2bn. Announced in October 2023 and rolled out first in the United States, it now covers fifteen countries and lets a Squarespace merchant accept cards, ACH, Klarna, Afterpay and other methods without connecting Stripe or PayPal, with payments, payouts, refunds and disputes managed inside the Squarespace dashboard. Underneath, Squarespace's own help documentation describes Stripe as its processing services partner, so this is a payment facilitator layered on Stripe rather than a new acquirer. US pricing is published in full: 2.9% plus 30¢ on standard cards on the Basic and Core plans, 2.7% on Plus and 2.5% on Advanced, a 1.5% surcharge on international cards, 3.2% plus 30¢ on American Express and premium cards, ACH at 1% to 1.5%, and a $20 dispute fee. Payouts are daily and reach a US bank account in one to two business days. The case for it is convenience and, on the higher plans, a modest rate cut; the case against is that it is no cheaper than Stripe direct on the plans most merchants are on, it is locked to Squarespace, and a steady stream of complaints describes risk holds on funds with no phone number to call.

Lemon Squeezy

Merchant of Record

C+

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant-of-record platform for selling software, digital downloads, subscriptions and licence keys, launched publicly in 2021 by a small team of founders led by JR Farr and acquired by Stripe in July 2024. As merchant of record it is the legal seller of record on every transaction: it collects and remits sales tax and VAT worldwide, absorbs fraud and chargeback liability, and pays the merchant a net amount twice a month. The price is one number — 5% plus 50 cents per transaction, with no monthly fee — plus surcharges of 1.5% on international and PayPal transactions and 0.5% on subscription payments, and the tooling around it (checkout overlays, licence keys, signed download links, affiliates, email marketing) is unusually complete for the price. The catch is what has happened since the acquisition. Stripe has built its own merchant-of-record product, Stripe Managed Payments, priced at 3.5% on top of standard Stripe fees, and in January 2026 Lemon Squeezy's chief executive wrote that the team had been heads-down on it, that Lemon Squeezy users had seen slower support and fewer updates as a result, and that the goal was to give them an easy way to migrate. Independent sentiment has collapsed accordingly: 1.2 on Trustpilot from 173 reviews, 88% of them one-star, mostly about onboarding rejections and unanswered support requests. The product still works and still signs up new merchants, but a buyer today is choosing a platform whose own maker is steering customers to its successor.

Dojo

Platform / Acquirer

B

Dojo is the trading name of Paymentsense Limited, a London company incorporated in 2008 that grew into one of the UK's largest card-terminal resellers before rebuilding itself, from 2020, as a cloud-native acquirer under the Dojo brand. It now holds its own acquiring licence rather than reselling Fiserv's, and by its own filings handled £46.2bn of card volume for roughly 146,000 merchant locations in the year to March 2025 — a share it puts at 12.5% of UK small-business card-present acquiring. The pitch is simple: a fast card machine, money in your account the next day including weekends and bank holidays, integration with more than 450 EPOS systems, and a UK phone line. For businesses turning over less than £100,000 a year on cards there is a published Fix plan at £39.99 a month covering the first £3,999 of monthly card turnover, with 1% above that. Everyone larger gets a quote. Independent satisfaction is strong — 4.2 on Trustpilot from 5,612 reviews, 88% of them five-star — and the company is FCA-authorised. Against that sit a 12-month minimum term with the remaining terminal fees payable if you leave early, custom pricing that cannot be benchmarked, a fee schedule with £28 chargebacks and a £15-a-month PCI non-compliance charge, and a balance sheet carrying £649m of net debt at a 14% effective interest rate.

Viva.com

Payfac / Aggregator

B

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.

takepayments

ISO

B

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

B-

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

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.

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.

Afterpay

BNPL Network

B

Afterpay is the buy-now-pay-later network founded in Sydney in October 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, and owned since January 2022 by Block, Inc. — the deal was announced in August 2021 at a headline US$29 billion and completed on far less, reported at roughly US$14 billion in Class A shares, because Block's own share price had fallen in the interim. For a merchant, the proposition is straightforward: offer shoppers four interest-free instalments over six weeks, or a monthly plan over six or twelve months, get paid up front rather than waiting for the customer to finish paying, and let Afterpay carry the fraud and non-payment risk. In exchange the merchant pays a commission Afterpay does not publish — third-party reviewers consistently report a range around 4% to 6% plus roughly $0.30 per transaction, several times the cost of taking the same sale on a card. Afterpay's own merchant marketing claims a 58% increase in average order value among accepting merchants and $8.6 billion of incremental US sales delivered over the preceding twelve months. Under Block, the product has increasingly become a Cash App feature rather than a standalone checkout button: Afterpay Post-Purchase and, from 2026, Afterpay Pre-Purchase let Cash App Card holders convert everyday card spend into instalments at any merchant, whether or not that merchant has ever signed an Afterpay agreement.

Wave (Wave Financial)

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Wave is a Toronto software company, started in April 2010, that gives away accounting and invoicing to very small businesses and makes its money when those invoices get paid. H&R Block bought it for $405 million in a deal that closed on 1 July 2019, and it has been a subsidiary ever since. Payments run at 2.9% plus 60 cents for Visa, Mastercard and Discover, 3.4% plus 60 cents for American Express, and 1% with a $1 minimum for bank payments, with no monthly fee on the free Starter plan; a $19-a-month Pro plan waives the 60-cent card fee on the first ten transactions each month and adds features. Card money lands in one to two business days, bank payments in one to seven, and eligible accounts can pull an instant payout to a debit card for a further 1%. Since November 2020 Wave has served the United States and Canada only. Its US card processing is powered by Adyen and Stripe, which Wave discloses in its own terms.

Riverside Payments

ISO

C+

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.

PaySimple

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

PaySimple is a Denver payments-and-billing platform for service businesses — the kind that invoice, take deposits and bill the same customers month after month rather than ring up a counter. Its own about page dates the business to 2006 and puts it at more than 22,000 businesses; the site footer carries a 2005 copyright and the Better Business Bureau file records a December 2006 start, so the exact birth year depends on which document you read. What matters more is the lineage: the company Eric Remer founded as PaySimple is the company that was incorporated as EverCommerce in 2016 and listed on Nasdaq in 2021. PaySimple was not bought by EverCommerce so much as it became it, and the brand now sits inside that group as one product among many — the BBB file is registered to "EverCommerce Solutions Inc., DBA PaySimple Inc." PaySimple is a registered ISO of Fifth Third Bank and of Wells Fargo Bank. Pricing is published in full and unusually plain: $79.95 a month with every feature included, 2.9% plus 30 cents on cards, 1% plus 30 cents on ACH, no contract and no cancellation fee.

Merchant Lynx Services

ISO

C

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.

Bluefin

Gateway / Orchestration

B

Bluefin is an Atlanta company that sells payment security rather than payment processing. Founded in 2007 and originally trading as Capital Payments, LLC doing business as Bluefin Payment Systems, it built its business on PCI-validated point-to-point encryption — technology that scrambles card data inside the terminal at the moment of the tap, so that what travels through the merchant's systems is already worthless to a thief. Around that it has assembled a gateway (PayConex), a decryption service sold to other processors and gateways (Decryptx), a tokenization platform for personal, health and card data (ShieldConex) and, more recently, a proxy layer called PointConex that adds validated encryption without forcing anyone to recertify their processor integrations. Bluefin says it now supports more than 40,000 customers across 60 countries through over 300 integration partners. Its headquarters is in Atlanta, with offices in Waterford, Ireland and Vienna, Austria; the Vienna presence came with its November 2022 acquisition of TECS Payment Systems. The Better Business Bureau rates it A+ and has accredited it since July 2017.

Sezzle

BNPL Network

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)

Payfac / Aggregator

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

Platform / Acquirer

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

Bank / A2A Payments

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)

Gateway / Orchestration

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

ISO

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

Payfac / Aggregator

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

ISO

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

Platform / Acquirer

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.

Affirm

BNPL Network

B-

Affirm is a buy-now-pay-later provider founded in 2012 by Max Levchin, Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz and Alex Rampell, headquartered at 221 Main Street in San Francisco and listed on Nasdaq as AFRM since January 2021. For the fiscal year ended 30 June 2026 it reported $50.2 billion of gross merchandise volume, up 37%, across approximately 571,000 active merchants and 27.8 million active consumers. Merchants integrate Affirm as a checkout option, Affirm underwrites and funds the consumer, and the merchant is paid in full up front minus a fee. Two things make it materially different from card acceptance: Affirm bears the consumer fraud risk on transactions it approves, and the merchant fee is several times a card rate — third-party surveys of mid-market merchants report 2% to 8%, while Affirm's own filings put blended merchant network revenue at 2.3% of GMV in FY2026. Its BBB profile is A+ and accredited; its consumer Trustpilot score is 1.7 across roughly 7,700 reviews.

Xsolla

Merchant of Record

B-

Xsolla is a merchant of record built specifically for video games, founded in Perm, Russia in 2005 as 2Pay by Aleksandr Agapitov, renamed Xsolla in 2011 and headquartered in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles since the company moved to California in 2010. It becomes the legal seller of your game or in-game item, which transfers sales tax, VAT, fraud loss and chargeback liability off the developer and onto Xsolla, and it is the dominant option for direct-to-player web shops that route around the 30% mobile app store cut. Its marketing describes a revenue share as low as 5%, with over 1,000 payment methods across 200-plus markets, 130-plus currencies and 25-plus languages. It publishes no full rate card, and its recent corporate history — a 2021 mass dismissal driven by workforce analytics, six former-executive lawsuits since 2019, and a 2024 Bloomberg investigation into more than $100 million moving between company and founder accounts — deserves as much of a developer's attention as the pricing does.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

Moov

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Moov Financial is a US payments platform for software companies, built by Wade Arnold and Bob Smith out of the open-source moov.io money-movement libraries Arnold began publishing in 2017. It sells one API that accepts cards and bank payments, holds balances in wallets, sends payouts by RTP, FedNow or push-to-card, and issues virtual cards — the full money-movement stack that a vertical SaaS company would otherwise assemble from four vendors. It is the rare payments company that publishes a complete rate card: interchange plus 0.60% and 15 cents for online card acceptance, interchange plus 0.50% and 15 cents for Tap to Pay, 25 cents for next-day ACH, and a $500 monthly minimum with no setup fee. It has raised roughly $77.5 million across three named rounds, with Visa, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures and Commerce Ventures on the register, and it operates in the United States only.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Ingenico

POS & Business Software

B-

Ingenico is the French payment terminal manufacturer behind a large share of the card readers on the world's counters, founded in Suresnes in 1980 and today selling terminals, SoftPOS and its Ingenico 360 cloud platform through banks, acquirers and ISVs rather than direct to merchants. Its own site claims roughly 3,000 staff across 52 offices in 32 countries, deployments in more than 120 countries, tens of millions of terminals in the field, over 1,000 bank and acquirer clients and 2,500-plus payment applications. It publishes no merchant pricing, because merchants are not its customers. The story of 2026 is financial rather than technical: after Apollo bought it from Worldline in 2022, Ingenico opened talks with its lenders in April 2026 over an interest bill it could not carry, and in August 2026 announced a recapitalisation that converted part of its debt to equity, brought in EUR 150 million of new money from a PIMCO-led group and removed Apollo from the shareholder register entirely.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

First Card Payments

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

First Card Payments is a high-risk merchant account provider operating from Brickell Avenue in Miami with a second office in Los Angeles, trading under the legal name Ellis Financial Holdings Corp with Alexander Ellis as president. It is a broker rather than a processor: it places accounts with what it describes as more than 30 banking and ISO partners, across 40-plus verticals that ordinary processors decline — adult, CBD, firearms, nutraceuticals, debt relief, travel, forex, gaming, dropshipping and pharmacy among them. It holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau without being accredited, and the BBB records the business as starting on 2 December 2015. It publishes no rates, no fees, no reserve terms and no contract terms anywhere on its site, and it appears in Fit Small Business's 2026 shortlist of high-risk providers as the pick for a one-stop account setup.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.5

BitPay

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

BitPay is a cryptocurrency payment processor founded in May 2011 by Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair, now based in Alpharetta, Georgia, and by its own description the world's longest-operating crypto payments company. A merchant is quoted in fiat, the customer pays in bitcoin, a stablecoin or another supported asset, and BitPay settles to the merchant's bank account in dollars on the next business day, absorbing the price movement. Its merchant pricing is published in full — 2% + 25 cents under $500,000 a month, 1.5% + 25 cents to $999,999, and 1% + 25 cents above $1 million — which puts it ahead of most of the payments industry on transparency. Crypto payments are push transactions, so there are no chargebacks. The company holds a BBB A without accreditation, settled with the US Treasury's sanctions office in 2021 over 2,102 apparent violations, and carries a 1.2-star Trustpilot score driven overwhelmingly by consumers using its wallet rather than by merchants.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Trustly

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

Trustly is a Swedish open-banking payments company, launched in Stockholm in 2008, that moves money directly from a shopper's bank account to a merchant's — bypassing the card networks entirely. It is, on its own account, the largest pay-by-bank provider in the world by volume — a ranking no independent source confirms: its full year 2025 results report processed volume up 17.6% to SEK 1,059.0 billion, the first year it has carried more than $100 billion in total payment value, and it passed 120 million users in April 2026. Revenue, however, fell 12% on a constant-currency basis to SEK 2,427.7 million and it made a SEK 565.0 million loss after tax, a year into a 24-month transformation programme. It is regulated in Sweden and the UK, and in February 2022 the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority issued it a warning and a SEK 130 million fine for serious anti-money-laundering failings. It publishes no merchant pricing.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.0

Spreedly

Gateway / Orchestration

B

Spreedly is a payment orchestration platform and PCI-compliant card vault founded in 2007 and run from Durham, North Carolina. It does not process payments itself. It stores your customers' card credentials in its own vault, connects them to more than 140 payment gateways through one API, and routes, retries and optimises transactions across them. It reported annual gross merchandise volume expected to exceed $60 billion for 2025, up from $50 billion in 2024, across more than 400 customers in 100-plus countries. Entry pricing for the vault starts at $750 a month; everything above that is quoted. It is enterprise infrastructure, not a merchant account, and a small business should not be shopping for it.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

Klarna

BNPL Network

B

Klarna is a Swedish-founded, UK-parented digital bank and flexible payments provider that listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025. Its full year 2025 results put it at $127.9 billion of gross merchandise volume, $3.5 billion of revenue, 118 million active consumers and 966,000 merchants. For a retailer it is not a merchant account — it is an additional payment method that sits alongside card acceptance, sold on the promise of higher conversion and larger baskets, and priced far above card interchange. Klarna publishes no US rate card, its dispute process runs on its own rules rather than the card networks', and it is defending a securities class action filed after its IPO.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

Inovio Payments

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

Inovio is a payment gateway aimed squarely at specialty and high-risk verticals — adult, firearms, e-cigarettes and vape, online gaming, online alcohol, credit repair, CBD, telemedicine, online pharmacy and nutraceuticals — alongside ordinary retail and SaaS. It is a wholly owned brand of North, the company formerly called North American Bancard, which launched it in April 2016, and it is a registered ISO of BMO Harris Bank. Its own site says 'Since 1992', a date that belongs to its parent group and to its sister brand Humboldt Merchant Services rather than to Inovio. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms, and it has no Better Business Bureau profile of its own.

Pricing clarity

0.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.0

FastSpring

Merchant of Record

B+

FastSpring is a merchant of record for software, SaaS, games and digital products, founded in Santa Barbara in 2005 and trading as Bright Market, LLC. It becomes the legal seller of your product, which means it — not you — owns the payment relationship, the sales tax and VAT obligation, the fraud loss and the chargeback. Its own site claims more than 3,200 customers, over $2 billion in transactions a year, 200-plus regions, 35-plus currencies and 21-plus languages. It holds a BBB A- and is twenty-one years old, both unusual in this category. It publishes no rates.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

TouchBistro

POS & Business Software

C+

TouchBistro is an iPad-based restaurant point of sale system from Toronto, used by more than 16,000 restaurants and acquired by Constellation Software's Harris division in July 2026. Operators generally like the software. What sinks the grade is the commercial relationship: annual agreements that auto-renew, an F rating with the Better Business Bureau after dozens of unanswered complaints, and a cancellation process that generates more grievances than any other aspect of the product.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

SignaPay

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

SecureGlobalPay

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

SecureGlobalPay is a Texas-based merchant account provider specialising in high-risk and hard-to-place businesses — firearms, tobacco and vape, adult, dating, supplements, travel, ticketing, credit repair and collections — across the US, Canada, the EU and the UK. Its BBB record is clean, and it advertises interchange-plus pricing with no long-term contract, but it publishes no actual rates and its independent review footprint is too thin to corroborate much.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.0

PayTrace

Gateway / Orchestration

B

PayTrace is a Spokane-area payment gateway built for businesses that sell to other businesses and to government. Its differentiator is automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture, which can qualify commercial and purchasing card transactions for materially lower interchange. It publishes no rate card, and the processing rate you actually pay is set by whichever merchant services provider sells you the account.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Celero Commerce

ISO

C+

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.0

REPAY

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A vertical payments company you probably meet through your software, not through a salesperson. REPAY — legally M & A Ventures, LLC doing business as REPAY, and known in full as Realtime Electronic Payments — was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Atlanta. It is publicly traded as RPAY and reported full-year 2025 revenue of $309.3 million, split between a Consumer Payments segment at $285.9 million and a Business Payments segment at $48.4 million, with 2026 guidance of $340 to $346 million. Its business is embedding payment acceptance and vendor disbursement inside the software that particular industries already run: consumer lenders, auto dealers and their finance arms, credit unions, receivables management firms, municipalities, healthcare, HOA and property management. The distinctive products are the ones a general processor does not build — Instant Funding, which pushes loan proceeds to a borrower's debit card in real time through Visa Direct, and an AP automation network REPAY says exceeded 602,000 suppliers at the end of 2025. What it does not do is publish a price or serve a walk-up merchant.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

NCR Voyix

POS & Business Software

B-

The retail and restaurant half of the old NCR. NCR Corporation — founded in 1884 as the National Cash Register Company — renamed itself NCR Voyix in October 2023 when it spun off its ATM business as NCR Atleos, and what remains is a unified commerce platform: Aloha and Counterpoint point of sale, self-checkout, and Voyix Pay processing sold alongside them. The scale is real. NCR Voyix reported 80,000 platform sites and more than 8,500 payment sites at the end of 2025, $1.7 billion of annual recurring revenue, and full-year Software and Services revenue of $1,986 million. The problem is the paper you sign. The published US merchant agreement sets a 36-month initial term that auto-renews for 12-month periods unless you give 60 days' notice, makes cancellation during the term immediately payable for every remaining month, and reserves an annual price increase of CPI plus 5% — with a contractual floor of 5% — that applies during the initial term as well as after it. Buy the platform if the platform is what you need, and negotiate the term before you sign anything.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.0

Leap Payments

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

CSG Forte

Platform / Acquirer

B

A biller-focused processor that does ACH properly. Forte Payment Systems was founded in Texas in 1998 and acquired by CSG Systems International on 1 October 2018, becoming CSG Forte; CSG itself was taken private by NEC's Netcracker subsidiary on 14 May 2026, so the parent above this business changed hands very recently. The company says it handles 260 million transactions and more than $195 billion a year for roughly 175,000 merchants, and it sells almost entirely into recurring-billing verticals — utilities, government, insurance, healthcare, property management, telecoms. Two things set it apart. It is a registered acquirer as well as a gateway, operating as an Elavon Payments MSP and a Registered MSP/ISO of Elavon, Inc., Georgia, and it publishes unusually honest documentation of how ACH actually settles, including the awkward fact that standard funding can take up to six business days. Against that, no rates are published, the standard agreement runs three years, and the BBB file shows unanswered complaints and merchants struggling to stop billing after cancellation.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Bankful

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

A high-risk-friendly gateway that does the one thing almost nobody in high risk does: it publishes its prices. Bankful sells gateway plans off a public page — $0 a month with a $50 monthly minimum and $0.15 a transaction at the bottom, $495 a month and $0.08 a transaction at the top — and lists the add-on costs alongside them, down to $38 per Ethoca alert and $1.60 per eCheck authentication. It is an officially supported third-party gateway for WooCommerce and works with BigCommerce, Wix, Ecwid and Shopify, and it accepts categories those platforms' own processors decline: CBD, nutraceuticals, firearms, tobacco, adult, dating, bail bonds and tech support. The reservations are substantial and you should weigh them properly. The card processing rate — the number that actually determines your cost — is not published, only the gateway fee on top of it. The independent record is polarised: an A+ Better Business Bureau file, accredited since 2020, against a 2.1 Trustpilot score where 91% of eleven reviews are one star. And Bankful shares a suite address and a co-founder with eMerchantBroker, so treat the two as one commercial relationship rather than two quotes.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Epos Now

POS & Business Software

B-

A cloud point-of-sale system founded in Norwich, England in 2011 by Jacyn Heavens, now operating in the US from an Orlando office and claiming more than 80,000 business locations across 70-plus countries. The software is well liked — 26,281 Trustpilot reviews average 4.3, and the day-to-day complaints are few. The problems are all at the edges of the relationship: nothing about software pricing is published on the US site, the hardware bundle is advertised behind a discount countdown that never actually runs out, no two independent reviewers describe the same contract length, and the recurring theme in the US complaint record is how hard it is to get out. BBB lists 114 complaints in three years against an A+ accredited profile. Good product, aggressive commercial packaging — get the term and the monthly cost in writing before you sign anything.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

emerchantpay

Platform / Acquirer

B

A London-headquartered payment service provider and acquirer, founded in 2002 by its current chief executive Jonas Reynisson, that is unusual in this market for owning both halves of the stack. emerchantpay holds its own FCA authorisation as an electronic money institution (Reg. No. 900778), has been a principal member of Visa Europe and Mastercard since 2012, launched its own gateway in 2013 and its own acquiring division in 2014, and runs card-present alongside online and mobile. It underwrites verticals most acquirers decline — gaming, forex, travel, subscriptions — which makes it a genuine option for merchants who have been turned down elsewhere, without being a broker reselling somebody else's appetite for risk. The catch is the usual one: no published pricing, quotes come from sales after underwriting, and high-risk accounts should expect a rolling reserve. Its US arm is in Boca Raton, but its licensing and scheme membership are European, so establish which entity is boarding you.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

Dwolla

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

An API for moving money between US bank accounts, founded in Des Moines in 2008 and one of the earliest companies to make ACH programmable. Dwolla does not touch cards at all: it does standard ACH, Same Day ACH, and instant payments over the RTP network and FedNow, behind a single integration. That is a genuinely useful thing to be able to buy, and Dwolla has been doing it longer than almost anyone. Two things should temper the enthusiasm. It no longer publishes any pricing — the pricing page now says only that terms are tailored to volume, rails and integration — and in May 2026 Dwolla was acquired by NMI, which is folding its capabilities into NMI's embedded payments platform. NMI says it will keep supporting existing Dwolla customers; neither company has said whether the Dwolla brand and product survive the integration. Build on it if bank-to-bank money movement is your requirement, but ask about the roadmap in writing.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

CardConnect

ISO

C+

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.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Amazon Pay

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Amazon's express checkout button for other people's websites. Amazon's merchant payments business dates to the Amazon Flexible Payments Service beta in August 2007; the product merchants use today launched as Login and Pay with Amazon on 8 October 2013 and took the Amazon Pay name later. A shopper clicks it, signs in with the Amazon account they already have, and pays with a card and address Amazon already holds. Pricing is published and ordinary — 2.9% plus a $0.30 authorization fee on US domestic transactions, 3.9% plus $0.30 when the card was issued abroad, no monthly fee and no setup fee — and Express Payout will fund a US bank account within 24 hours including weekends, for free. What Amazon Pay is not is a merchant account. It is online-only, it has no card-present product, its acceptable use policy bans a long list of categories outright including CBD regardless of state law, and it only ever captures the slice of your checkout that Amazon shoppers choose. Treat it as a second button next to your real processor, not as a replacement for one.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

4.5

Worldline

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Europe's largest listed payments company and, since March 2026, one that no longer sells to North American merchants at all — it sold its North American subsidiaries, including Bambora North America, to Shift4. What remains is a Paris-headquartered acquirer and processor serving roughly 1.2 million merchants and financial institutions across Europe with about 13,400 staff. The last two years have been brutal: a June 2025 investigative report accused it of knowingly processing for prohibited and high-risk clients, Belgian prosecutors opened a money-laundering probe into its local unit, the shares fell more than 40%, and S&P cut the credit rating to junk in August 2025. The underlying acquiring business is real and licensed; the governance record and the balance sheet are why this is not a B.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.0

TailoredPay

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

A small Miami high-risk merchant account broker founded in 2019, whose whole proposition is placing US businesses that ordinary acquirers decline — adult, CBD, vape, lending, dating, telemedicine, travel, dropshipping and, more recently, prop trading firms. It publishes a real address, a named list of over a hundred verticals, gateway integrations with Authorize.net and NMI, and — unusually for this corner of the market — some indicative pricing on its own blog. What it does not have is much of a public record: 42 Trustpilot reviews, every single one of them five stars, no BBB profile we could find, and no named acquiring banks. The absence of complaints is not the same as evidence of good outcomes, and a spotless rating on a small sample deserves scepticism rather than credit.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Newtek Payments (NewtekOne)

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Leaders Merchant Services

ISO

C+

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.0

Cybersource

Gateway / Orchestration

B

Visa's enterprise payment gateway, founded in 1994 in Silicon Valley and bought by Visa for about $2 billion in 2010. It is one of the largest gateways in the world — Cybersource's own marketing claims 14.3 billion transactions a year, connections to more than 200 acquirers and processors across 160-plus countries, and 99.999% uptime — and its Decision Manager fraud engine is genuinely among the best-regarded in the industry. What it does not do is publish a single price. Cybersource has no public rate card, no published gateway fee and no self-serve signup; every quote comes through a sales conversation or through whichever acquirer resells it to you. For a large merchant with a payments team that is normal. For anyone smaller, it is the main reason to look at its sister brand Authorize.net instead.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

2.5

Xplor Pay

Platform / Acquirer

B

The US payments arm of Xplor Technologies, and the company you knew as Clearent until it dropped the name in July 2025. It is a straightforward mid-market acquirer with two things going for it that most of its peers do not have: interchange-plus is the default rather than the upsell, and next-day funding runs on an 11:00 p.m. Eastern cut-off, which is about as late as this industry gets. The trade-offs are the ordinary ISO ones — a three-year term and a per-location early termination fee reported at $395, a PCI non-compliance charge around $25 a month, and an annual fee that steps up after year one. Nothing here is published by the company, which is the recurring frustration.

Payroc

ISO

B

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

PAYARC

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Nadapayments

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

2.5

Ease of use

4.0

Gravity Payments

ISO

B+

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.

Pricing clarity

4.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Verifone

Platform / Acquirer

C+

The terminal company that became a payments company. Verifone has been making card-reading hardware since 1981 and is the device behind a very large share of the world's checkout counters, but the merchant-facing business it has assembled around that hardware — Verifone Payments acquiring, plus the 2Checkout platform it bought in 2020 — is a much weaker story. Its US BBB profile carries an F for failing to answer complaints, its own .com Trustpilot page sits at 1.5 out of 5, and no acquiring rate is published anywhere. The only prices Verifone publishes are 2Checkout's, and those are merchant-of-record rates for selling software, not merchant-account rates.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

2.5

Tilled

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A Boulder, Colorado company that sells payments infrastructure to software companies rather than merchant accounts to businesses. Tilled claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service: a software vendor gets the economics of being a payment facilitator — a share of the processing revenue on every transaction its customers make — without taking on the registration, underwriting and compliance burden of actually becoming one. It is one of the very few companies in this catalogue that publishes its own prices in public, which is the main reason it grades where it does.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Priority Commerce

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Fortis

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

An embedded-payments specialist that sells to software platforms first and merchants second. Fortis plugs card acceptance into ERP and business software — Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage — and is registered as both a payment facilitator and an ISO for several banks, including KeyBank and Fifth Third. It took a growth recapitalisation from Audax Private Equity alongside existing investor Lovell Minnick in March 2025. It publishes no pricing at all, and the third-party sources describing its contract terms flatly contradict each other, which is the single most important thing to know before you sign.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

DirectPayNet

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

A small high-risk merchant account brokerage aimed squarely at online sellers — supplements, coaching, subscriptions, dropshipping, digital products, high-ticket offers — that mainstream processors decline. It does not underwrite or process anything itself; it places you with acquiring banks and negotiates your terms, then works on the things that actually keep a high-risk account alive: chargeback prevention through Ethoca and Verifi, approval-rate optimisation, backup MIDs and reserve terms. Unusually for the sector, it publishes a genuine fee-range guide. Unusually badly, it publishes no corporate address and has no meaningful independent review record at all.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Rapyd

Platform / Acquirer

B-

A London-headquartered, Israeli-founded fintech-as-a-service platform that sells collection, payouts and multi-currency accounts through one API. Its 2025 purchase of PayU's Latin America and Africa business for $610 million gave it direct local acquiring in six Latin American countries plus Nigeria and South Africa — genuinely hard-to-reach markets. It is built for platforms and marketplaces rather than small merchants, publishes almost no acquiring pricing, and its public merchant reviews are poor.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.0

Paddle

Merchant of Record

B

A London merchant of record for software, SaaS and AI companies, founded in 2012 and used by more than 6,000 digital product businesses by its own July 2025 count. It publishes one flat price — 5% + 50¢ — and in exchange becomes the legal seller of your product, taking on global sales tax and VAT registration, filing and liability. That is a real transfer of risk, and it is expensive: roughly double a card processor's rate, paid out once a month rather than daily.

Pricing clarity

4.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Merchant One

ISO

C+

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.5

Humboldt Merchant Services

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Heartland Payment Systems

Platform / Acquirer

B-

A large US small-business processor founded in 1997, bought by Global Payments for $4.3 billion in 2016 and now openly in the middle of being retired as a brand — Global Payments' own page is headed "Heartland Payment Systems is now Global Payments." It still sells under the Heartland name at heartland.us, still runs the Merchant Bill of Rights it invented, and still publishes no pricing. Signing today means signing with a brand that is being folded away around you.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Kurv (formerly Electronic Merchant Systems)

ISO

C+

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.

SpotOn

POS & Business Software

B-

A restaurant-first point-of-sale and payments platform founded in 2017, with published plan rates, next-morning funding and unusually well-regarded support. The catch is the contract: a two-year minimum on its headline plan, a mid-2026 rate increase applied to existing merchants, and cancellation terms it does not publish.

SMB Global

Agent Office / Reseller

C+

A small Utah high-risk shop that places domestic and offshore merchant accounts for hard-to-approve verticals. Reviewers who have dealt with it speak well of it, but almost nothing about the company is verifiable from primary sources — no rates, no contract terms, no BBB profile, no About page and no independent reviews at all.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.0

Segpay

Merchant of Record

B

A South Florida high-risk biller founded in 2005, registered with Visa as an internet payment service provider and with Mastercard as a payment facilitator, serving adult, dating, subscription and content merchants across the US, EU, UK and Australia. It publishes its settlement terms in detail and its rates not at all.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

PayJunction

ISO

B+

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.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.5

Mollie

Payfac / Aggregator

B+

One of Europe's largest independent payment service providers, serving more than 250,000 businesses from Amsterdam and authorised by the Dutch central bank as an electronic money institution. It publishes its full price list, which almost nobody at its scale does, and it is in the middle of absorbing GoCardless in a €1.05 billion deal. It processes for Europe and the UK only, and account freezes are the recurring complaint.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.5

pmtbox (formerly National Processing)

ISO

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Instabill

Agent Office / Reseller

C+

A small New Hampshire high-risk shop that places merchant accounts with domestic and offshore banks for verticals mainstream acquirers refuse. It charges no application fee and is candid about rolling reserves — but it publishes no rates, is not BBB-accredited or rated, and leaves almost no verifiable public trail.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.0

GoDaddy Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B

GoDaddy's in-house processor, built on the Poynt technology it bought in 2020. Flat published rates, no monthly fee and next-business-day payouts make it a genuinely competitive small-business option — provided you are willing to run your commerce inside GoDaddy's ecosystem.

GoCardless

Bank / A2A Payments

B

A bank-payments specialist built for recurring billing. GoCardless collects by ACH and other direct debit schemes rather than by card, with published, capped per-transaction pricing — but it processes no card payments at all, and merchant complaints about account freezes and slow support are persistent.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

4.0

CCBill

Merchant of Record

B-

One of the longest-running high-risk processors in the United States, operating since 1998 and built around subscription billing for adult, dating, streaming and creator platforms. It will underwrite what almost nobody else will — but it publishes no rates, and its contract terms deserve a careful read.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Rainforest

Payfac / Aggregator

B

An Atlanta payfac-as-a-service provider that publishes its entire buy-rate card in public — 0.30% and $0.30 falling to 0.20% and $0.20 at volume, with no revenue share — for software platforms embedding payments. Not a merchant account, and only four years old.

Host Merchant Services

ISO

B+

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.

BlueSnap

Platform / Acquirer

C+

A capable global orchestration platform — published card rates in a handful of countries, local acquiring in 50 more, one integration for over 200 regions — carrying a 2024 FTC settlement for processing payments for a known scam, and now owned by Payroc.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

Finix

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A San Francisco processor that charges a monthly subscription — from $250 — and takes zero markup on interchange, billing a flat $0.08 or $0.15 per transaction instead. Excellent economics above roughly $1m a year, wrong below it, and with a public track record still too thin to lean on.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Easy Pay Direct

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

An Austin high-risk specialist that publishes flat rates — 2.69% + $0.36 online, 1.59% + $0.19 swiped — and routes merchants across 30+ banking partners so one declined account does not stop the business. Its own marketing overstates its Trustpilot score, and its BBB rating is D- for unanswered complaints.

Pricing clarity

3.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Dharma Merchant Services

ISO

A-

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.

Pricing clarity

5.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

4.0

SumUp

Payfac / Aggregator

B+

A pay-as-you-go card reader and POS provider with flat published rates, no monthly fee and no contract. Strong for small and mobile sellers; the recurring complaint is account freezes and held funds with slow resolution.

North (North American Bancard)

Platform / Acquirer

C+

One of the largest privately held US acquirers, rebranded from North American Bancard in 2024 — a rebrand that also reset its public review record. It publishes POS rates and says it does not require a long-term contract, but reviewers who have read its traditional merchant agreement report a three-year term with a liquidated-damages termination clause.

eMerchantBroker

ISO

B

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Worldpay

Platform / Acquirer

C+

One of the largest acquirers in the world, bought by Global Payments in January 2026 and now being folded into that brand. Enormous reach, but small merchants still get a three-year contract, an auto-renewal clause and pricing that is never published.

Soar Payments

ISO

B

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Airwallex

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A global business account and payment platform with published rates, no lock-in contract and unusually cheap FX. Strong for cross-border sellers; weaker as a plain domestic card processor, and not an option for high-risk merchants.

Durango Merchant Services

ISO

B+

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.

Nuvei

Platform / Acquirer

B

Nuvei is a Montreal-based global payment technology company founded in 2003 that offers 700+ payment methods across 200+ markets and deep vertical expertise in iGaming, fintech, and high-risk sectors — but carries meaningful risks around contract terms, pricing transparency, and customer support quality.

Checkout.com

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

3.0

Lightspeed

POS & Business Software

B+

Lightspeed Commerce is a global cloud-based POS and commerce platform that provides retail, restaurant, and ecommerce businesses with integrated payments, inventory management, analytics, and omnichannel selling tools.

PayKings

Agent Office / ResellerClaimed

A

PayKings is a specialized payment processor offering tailored solutions for high-risk industries with a strong emphasis on fraud prevention.

Shift4

Platform / Acquirer

B+

Shift4 Payments is a full-service payment processor and POS provider specializing in integrated commerce solutions for restaurants, hospitality, retail, and enterprise merchants.

Moneris

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Moneris is Canada’s largest payment processor, providing point-of-sale systems, ecommerce payment gateways, and mobile payment solutions for businesses across Canada through a joint venture owned by Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal.

Bank of America Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Bank of America Merchant Services is a large, bank-integrated payment processing solution ideal for existing BofA business checking customers who value brand stability, seamless funding, and broad payment acceptance though it lags behind fintech competitors on pricing transparency, modern integrations, and third-party review scores.

Wells Fargo Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Wells Fargo Merchant Services is a division of one of the largest U.S. banks, offering credit and debit card processing, Clover POS systems, and e-commerce solutions to small and medium-sized businesses.

Chase Payment Solutions and Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

B

Chase Payment Solutions is the merchant services arm of the #1 US bank, offering small and mid-sized businesses a deeply integrated combination of payment processing, same-day deposits, and banking tools. They're backed by the trust and scale of JPMorgan Chase but with flat-rate fees that may not suit high-volume merchants.

Toast POS

POS & Business Software

B

Toast POS is the leading all-in-one cloud-based restaurant management platform, purpose-built for the food service industry with deep features for ordering, payments, payroll, and analytics, but comes with restrictive multi-year contracts, mandatory payment processor lock-in, and a history of transparency controversies.

WooPayments (Automattic)

Payfac / Aggregator

B

WooPayments is the official, Stripe-powered payment solution built exclusively for WooCommerce stores, offering no monthly fees and deep dashboard integration, but plagued by account suspension issues and inconsistent customer support that undermine trust for serious merchants.

Fiserv (Carat)

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Carat from Fiserv is an enterprise-grade global commerce platform that orchestrates omnichannel payments, data intelligence, and customer experience solutions for the world's largest businesses, but hampered by opaque pricing, complex contracting, and a widespread customer service reputation that does not match its technological ambitions.

Elavon

Platform / Acquirer

C-

Elavon is one of the world's largest payment processors, serving over 2 million merchant locations across 36 countries offering a comprehensive suite of enterprise payment solutions, but widely criticized by small and mid-size merchants.

Global Payments

Platform / Acquirer

C

Global Payments Inc. is a Fortune 500 payments technology behemoth, processing trillions of dollars annually across 38 countries, offering massive scale and enterprise capabilities, but consistently criticized by small and mid-size merchants for opaque pricing, hidden fees, rigid contracts, poor customer support, and a significant history of legal actions.

Helcim

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

Helcim is a Calgary-based payment processing company that offers genuinely transparent interchange-plus pricing with no monthly fees, no hidden charges, and a comprehensive suite of free payment tools.

Payment Depot

ISO

C+

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.

Stax

ISO

B

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.

CARDZ3N

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

CARDZ3N is a global payment processing platform that supports multi-channel payments, including credit cards, ACH, crypto, and BNPL, tailored to both standard and high-risk merchants.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

High Risk Pay

Agent Office / Reseller

C

High Risk Pay is a merchant account provider specializing in high-risk merchant services and payment processing solutions including credit card and ACH acceptance for businesses that struggle with traditional payment processors.

Paysafe

Platform / Acquirer

C-

Paysafe is a global payments technology platform that provides merchants and consumers with payment processing, digital wallet services, alternative payment methods, and secure transaction infrastructure.

EBizCharge

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

EBizCharge is an embedded payment gateway and integrated merchant services platform that simplifies credit card, debit card, and ACH payment processing directly inside accounting, ERP, CRM, and ecommerce systems.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

3.0

Akurateco

Gateway / Orchestration

B+

Akurateco is a white-label PCI DSS-compliant payment orchestration platform that enables businesses and PSPs to deploy advanced payment infrastructure and unify multiple payment methods globally.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

Maverick Payments

ISO

B+

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.

Corepay

ISO

B

Corepay is a payment processor that specializes in tailored merchant accounts for high-risk industries with global service and a focus on customer support.

Payoneer

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Payoneer is a global fintech platform that enables businesses, freelancers, and marketplaces to send and receive cross-border payments, manage multi-currency funds, and scale internationally.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

Shopify Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

Shopify Payments is Shopify’s own branded payments service — processed by Stripe, per Shopify’s published processor list — giving merchants one-click access to accepting cards and wallets inside Shopify, simplifying setup and eliminating third-party gateway fees for supported merchants.

Clover

POS & Business Software

B

Clover is a widely used, all-in-one POS platform (hardware + software + app marketplace) favored by small and medium retailers and restaurants and backed by Fiserv, offering broad functionality but with real-world variability in support and reseller pricing.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

Adyen

Platform / Acquirer

A-

Adyen is a global, enterprise-grade payments platform that unifies acquiring, processing, routing and risk management into a single stack for merchants with international and omnichannel needs.

PayPal

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

PayPal is a global, feature-rich digital payments platform (consumer wallet + merchant services) with extensive integrations and brand reach. It is trusted by many businesses but criticized in public reviews for dispute handling and account-hold practices.

Braintree (PayPal Enterprise Payments)

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

Braintree is a full-featured, globally-capable payment gateway solution (online + mobile) backed by PayPal, offering robust APIs, developer tooling, and enterprise-class features for merchants. Primarily deals in mobile and web payment systems.

Authorize.net

Gateway / Orchestration

A-

Authorize.Net is a mature, Visa-owned payment gateway that offers robust, developer-friendly payment tools, strong fraud controls, and wide platform integrations. Pricing and merchant-account terms that vary depending on whether you use Authorize.Net’s all-in-one plan or attach your own processor.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

NMI (Network Merchants Inc)

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

NMI (Network Merchants, Inc.) is a mature, ISO/ISV-focused embedded-payments gateway and enablement platform with broad developer tooling and enterprise integrations, but merchant experiences can vary depending on the partner/acquirer relationship.

Zen Payments

Agent Office / ResellerClaimed

A-

Zen Payments is known for quick setup of merchant accounts and accepting businesses that mainstream providers turn away. Businesses should familiarize themselves with the terms of their contract to avoid disruptions.

Payment Cloud

Agent Office / Reseller

B+

A well-run high-risk merchant services shop with unusually good service ratings and no junk fees — but since its 2024 acquisition it is a Kurv company, and Kurv now routes almost everything through its own platform, which is not the bank-agnostic brokerage the brand's reputation was built on.

Pricing clarity

3.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Stripe

Payfac / Aggregator

A

Stripe is a leading payment processor known for its developer-friendly API, transparent pricing, and comprehensive suite of payment solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Square

POS & Business Software

A

Square offers simple, transparent payment processing ideal for small businesses. Flat-rate pricing, no monthly fees, and excellent software make it a top choice — but account holds and limited support are key concerns.