First Card Payments Review

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.

What First Card Payments is

First Card Payments is a high-risk merchant account broker operating from 1395 Brickell Avenue in Miami, with a second office in Los Angeles. Its legal name on the Better Business Bureau record is Ellis Financial Holdings Corp and its president is listed as Alexander Ellis. The proposition is straightforward and, in this segment, the right one: it maintains relationships with what it says are more than thirty banks and ISOs, and its job is to know which of them will currently underwrite your vertical and to get your file to that one.

That is worth stating plainly because it determines what the company can and cannot promise. First Card Payments does not hold your money, does not set your reserve and does not write the merchant agreement. A bank does, and which bank you land with is the single biggest determinant of how the relationship goes. A good broker earns its margin by picking well and by staying involved when something goes wrong; a bad one collects a residual and disappears. Nothing in the public record tells you which of those this is, which is why the diligence advice at the end of this review is specific.

The reputation record, which is better than the category norm

The Better Business Bureau rates First Card Payments A+ and shows the business as starting on 2 December 2015, giving it ten years on the record. The company is not BBB accredited. There is no visible pattern of unresolved complaints on the file, which is a genuinely good result in high-risk merchant services — a segment where the typical BBB page is a run of merchants alleging withheld reserves and surprise termination fees. Fit Small Business also named the company in its 2026 shortlist of best high-risk providers, as the pick for a one-stop account setup, which is one of the very few independent signals available on a firm this size.

Set against that is a near-total absence of merchant voices. There is no substantive Trustpilot presence, no established coverage on the merchant-services review sites that track this industry, and no customer reviews of substance on the BBB file. A clean record and a thin record look identical from outside. We are reading this as mildly positive — ten years without an accumulation of complaints is not nothing — while noting that it rests on the absence of bad evidence rather than the presence of good.

The tenure discrepancy

The company's own site describes over twenty years of experience and twenty-five years of relationships with banks and ISOs. The BBB record starts the business on 2 December 2015. Both can be true at once — a firm founded in 2015 by people with two decades in payments behind them is an ordinary story, and this industry is full of them. But the marketing does not make that distinction, and a merchant reading 'over 20 years of experience' on a homepage will reasonably assume it describes the company. If longevity is part of why you are choosing a provider, ask directly how long this entity has held its current bank relationships, and treat the answer as more informative than the headline.

The pricing you cannot see

Nothing is published. Not a rate range, not a monthly fee, not a gateway or PCI fee, not a chargeback fee, not a reserve percentage, not a contract term. The company's own article about high-risk merchant account fees quotes generic industry figures — roughly 3% to 10% per transaction, $20 to $200 a month, $25 to $100 a chargeback, reserves of 5% to 20% of monthly volume — and then routes the reader to an application without stating where First Card Payments itself sits in any of those ranges.

For high-risk placement this is more defensible than it would be elsewhere, because the rate is genuinely set by the underwriting bank against your file, your chargeback history and your vertical, and a published number would be fiction. It is still a cost to you: you cannot triangulate before you engage, and the only defence is to run two or three specialists in parallel and compare the actual offers. Do that. The spread between high-risk quotes for the same business is routinely two or three percentage points, and it is invisible unless you collect more than one.

There are favourable terms in circulation — month-to-month contracts, no early termination fee, no setup or application fee, and a promise that switching merchants save 25% immediately. Those come from a third-party high-risk review site rather than from First Card Payments' own published terms, and that site is itself a lead-generation business in this category. We are recording the claims because they are what a prospect will find when they search, and flagging that we could not corroborate any of them from the company. If they are offered to you, they belong in the signed agreement, not in an email.

What to actually check

In high-risk processing the headline rate is rarely what costs you the most. The rolling reserve is. A 10% reserve held for 180 days on a business doing $200,000 a month means $120,000 of your money sits with somebody else on a permanent rolling basis, and the terms under which it is raised or released are frequently vaguer than the terms under which it is imposed. Get the percentage, the hold period, the trigger conditions for an increase and the release mechanics in writing, from the bank's agreement rather than a summary.

Then ask which bank is underwriting, and ask before the application goes in rather than after. Ask what the effective rate is on your actual average ticket once every per-item, monthly, gateway, PCI and chargeback fee is included — not the discount rate. And ask what happens at termination: how long the reserve is held after the account closes, and who is responsible for returning it. A broker who answers all four clearly is worth working with; one who deflects any of them has told you something useful.

Our take

First Card Payments earns a B-. It has a clean ten-year BBB record with an A+ rating in a category where that is unusual, a named principal, two US offices, a genuinely broad list of accepted verticals and the bank relationships that make high-risk placement work. It publishes nothing about what any of it costs, its marketing claims a tenure its own BBB record does not support, and the favourable contract terms attached to its name in search results come from a lead-generation site rather than from the company. That combination is a reasonable candidate to include in a set of quotes and a poor candidate to accept without comparison. Get three offers, read the reserve terms first, and let the numbers decide.