Priority Commerce Review

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.

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

The biggest processor you have never heard of

Priority was founded in Georgia in 2005 as Priority Payment Systems and spent most of its life selling through other people. ISOs, software vendors and banks put their own names on the front; Priority did the processing behind it. That is why a company reporting 1.8 million customer accounts and over $150 billion in annual transaction volume is a name most business owners have never encountered, even though roughly 3,700 new merchants a month land on its platform.

The corporate history is a straightforward accumulation. Commercial payments in 2008. The acquisition of American Credit Card Processing Corp in 2015. A NASDAQ listing in 2018 under PRTH. Finxera in 2021, now operating as CFTPay and giving Priority a banking-as-a-service platform that today holds $1.7 billion in account balances. Plastiq in 2023, extending it into B2B payments and spend management. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at $953.0 million, up 8% year over year, with fourth-quarter revenue of $247.1 million, up 8.8% against $227.1 million a year earlier. This is a real company at real scale, and nothing in this review should be read as doubting that.

What you can buy

The merchant-facing product is MX Merchant, a console that pulls billing, sales tracking, customer engagement, QuickBooks sync and analytics together, with MX POS and eTab covering point of sale and hospitality. Same-day funding is marketed as a standard capability rather than a premium tier, which is genuinely useful for a business running tight on working capital — though Priority does not publish the eligibility rules or batch cut-off, and both are the usual place same-day funding quietly stops applying.

Around that sit payables automation, embedded banking and payroll. If your ambition is to stop juggling four financial vendors, Priority is one of very few companies that can plausibly offer to be all of them, and that breadth is the honest reason to take the meeting.

The price is whatever your salesperson says it is

Priority publishes nothing: no rate, no range, no monthly fee, no term, no cancellation fee. That is normal for this end of the industry and it is still a mark against them. But there is a second-order problem specific to Priority. Because so much of the book is written by ISO partners, the agreement you sign is drafted by the reseller, not by Priority. Two Priority merchants down the same street can be on materially different terms, and any general statement about "Priority's contract" — including the ones in this review — may simply not describe the paper in front of you.

What third parties report, consistently enough to be worth repeating with attribution: a three-year standard term, a monthly account fee, a PCI compliance fee, a monthly minimum and per-transaction authorisation fees layered on the discount rate, and early termination fees somewhere between $200 and $600. Individual BBB complaints cite $299 and $495. Review sites cite a $25 monthly fee and a $129.99 annual fee. We could not confirm any of these from Priority, so none of them should be treated as a quote — they are the range of things other merchants say happened to them.

Interchange-plus is available. Ask for it, get the markup expressed in basis points plus a per-transaction figure, and get the whole fee schedule attached to the agreement. If the person selling to you will not put the markup in writing, that tells you what you need to know about the deal.

The complaints all point at the same door

The Alpharetta BBB profile is accredited, rated A+, and shows 37 complaints in three years — 21 of them closed in the last twelve months. For a company with 1.8 million customer accounts, that is a low absolute number. The interesting figure is the resolution split: 6 resolved against 31 answered but not resolved. Priority replies to complaints. Merchants frequently stay unhappy afterwards.

And the complaints are strikingly uniform. They are almost all about leaving. Merchants who cannot get anyone on the phone with the authority to close an account. A $10 monthly service fee still being drawn from a business that closed its account in 2022. Compliance fees appearing without notice. Refunds promised for a date and not arriving. Disputed balances handed to collections and showing up on personal credit reports. One complainant describes trying five times to close a client's merchant account without a call back.

That pattern is worth more to you than any star rating, because it is entirely preventable from your side. Establish the cancellation route, the notice period and the exit fee before you sign. When you do cancel, do it in writing, demand a dated written confirmation of closure, keep it, and watch your bank statements for the next six months. The merchants filing these complaints are overwhelmingly people who assumed a phone call was enough.

A note on fee-based programmes

Priority markets cash discounting, convenience fees, service fees and surcharging prominently — its merchant-services page pitches supporting "any fee-based solution, regardless of the processing environment" as a way to cut costs. Be clear about what that actually means: these programmes do not lower your processing cost, they move it onto your customers. They also carry state-law restrictions and card-network rules on disclosure, capping and eligibility, and compliance with those rules is your legal exposure, not Priority's. They can be the right choice. They are not a discount.

The grade

B-. Priority is financially solid, technically broad and — for a company processing $150 billion a year — not heavily complained about in absolute terms. What keeps it at the bottom of the B range is that everything a merchant needs to make an informed decision is withheld until a sales conversation, that the terms are set by whichever partner is reselling, and that the complaints which do exist cluster almost entirely on the one thing that is hardest to fix after the fact: getting out.