Fortis Review

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.

Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using Fortis’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.

Payments inside the software, not beside it

Fortis sells to software platforms first. Its pitch is that a business running Acumatica or NetSuite or Sage should be able to take a card payment inside that system — against the invoice, reconciled to the ledger, without a separate terminal or a separate portal — and that the software vendor should earn a share of the processing revenue for making that possible. Fortis calls it a "Platform-to-Platform model"; the industry calls it embedded payments, and it is where a meaningful share of the mid-market is heading.

It is registered as both a payment facilitator and an ISO across several banks, naming KeyBank and Fifth Third among them, which is unusually specific disclosure and practically useful: it means Fortis can sponsor a software vendor as a full payfac or run a simpler referral relationship, depending on how much risk and compliance work the vendor wants to own.

Who is behind it, and how old is it

Fortis is headquartered in Plano, Texas, with offices in Vero Beach, Florida and Costa Mesa, California, and is led by CEO Greg Cohen and president Jimmy Nafso. Lovell Minnick Partners first invested in December 2019, and on 12 March 2025 Audax Private Equity joined LMP in a growth-oriented recapitalisation with no disclosed valuation. Fortis says it processes billions of dollars annually and, at the time of its October 2021 rebrand, claimed to have grown fivefold over the preceding two years with 46% organic volume growth in the prior twelve months.

The founding year is another matter, and it is worth being explicit about why this listing has none. Third-party reviewers state that Fortis began in Novi, Michigan in 1998 as Cambridge Payment Systems, became Fortis Payment Systems, then FortisPay, and rebranded to plain Fortis in October 2021. That story is plausible and it is repeated in several places — but Fortis publishes no founding date on its own site, its own rebrand press release gives none, and we could find no primary record confirming the Cambridge lineage. Payment brands are bought and renamed constantly, and a year attached to a name online is very often the year of a predecessor. We would rather show you nothing than show you a date we cannot stand behind.

The pricing is not just unpublished — the public record disagrees with itself

Plenty of processors publish nothing. That is bad, but it is normal, and usually the third-party review ecosystem converges on a rough consensus you can at least use as a starting point. Fortis is the unusual case where it has not converged at all.

• One review directory lists a $0 setup fee, no contract required, month-to-month terms, no early termination fee, a 1.00%–4.99% rate band across swiped, keyed and virtual-terminal transactions, and 48-month locked equipment leases.
• Another reports a $75 application fee, a $25 chargeback fee, a one-year contract and a $99 early termination fee.
• One records Fortis as having no BBB profile at all; BBB itself carries at least two Fortis listings, in Plano and Vero Beach.
• Trustpilot scores quoted on aggregator pages range from 2.8 out of 5 on 823 reviews to 3.9 out of 5, while the page itself showed 3.6 from 1,007 reviews when we checked it on 26 August 2026.

A one-year contract with a $99 exit fee and a month-to-month arrangement with no exit fee are not two descriptions of the same thing. At least one of those sources is wrong, and we have no way to tell you which. The practical consequence is simple and it is the most useful sentence in this review: do not sign anything on the strength of what a comparison site says Fortis's terms are, including this one. Get the term length, the notice period, the termination fee, the fee schedule and the equipment arrangement in writing, on your own paper, before you sign.

Read the one-star reviews

Fortis's Trustpilot profile shows 3.6 out of 5 from 1,007 reviews, which sounds unremarkable until you look at the distribution: 82% five-star, 5% four-star, 1% three-star, under 1% two-star, and 11% one-star. Real, unmanaged customer sentiment does not usually look like that. A hollow middle with a large five-star mass and a hard one-star floor is what you get when a company systematically asks happy customers for reviews while unhappy ones show up unprompted.

That does not make the five-star reviews fake — solicited is not the same as fabricated. It does mean the 3.6 average understates how good the good experience is and overstates how rare the bad one is. The one-star themes are worth taking at face value: termination requests repeatedly ignored, charges disputed after cancellation, refunds refused despite written agreements to waive cancellation costs, long hold times, being passed between representatives, and processing outages that interrupted trading. That last one carries extra weight for an embedded-payments customer, because when Fortis stops processing, the software your business runs in stops taking money.

The grade

B-. The product is real and the ERP integration story is a legitimate reason for a mid-market B2B business to choose Fortis over a generic processor. The institutional backing is serious. But a company that publishes no price, no term and no exit fee, whose public record cannot agree on whether it uses contracts at all, and whose negative reviews cluster on being unable to leave, has not earned more than the bottom of the B range — however good the integration is.