Riverside Payments Review

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.

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

What Riverside Payments is

Riverside Payments is a merchant services sales organisation in Vancouver, Washington, on file with the Better Business Bureau since 31 March 2014 and a registered ISO of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. of Concord, California. It sells card processing to American small and mid-sized businesses through a field sales force, bundled with point-of-sale hardware from Clover, Dejavoo, TouchBistro, Aldelo and NCR, and it competes principally on two claims that appear across its own marketing: free and secure point-of-sale or credit card machines, and help getting out of the contract you are already in.

It publishes no rates, no fee schedule, no contract length and no funding times. Every specific figure in this review therefore comes from the public complaint record rather than from the company, which is itself a finding worth stating plainly.

The complaint record

The Better Business Bureau grades Riverside Payments A, and it is not accredited. Behind that letter sit 256 complaints in the last three years, 71 of them closed in the last twelve months. Those two facts are not in tension: a BBB grade rewards a company for answering what is filed against it, and Riverside does answer. What it does not do is stop the complaints recurring, and the volume is very large for a company of this size.

The themes barely vary. Sales representatives are described as promising savings against a current statement that did not materialise. Charges arrive higher than what was quoted, with monthly processing fees running from roughly $39 to over $200 and PCI compliance charges around $189. Merchants describe accounts opened against personal rather than business details. Cancelling is described as taking several attempts, with an early-termination fee of $695 quoted in response — $499 also appears. And running through nearly all of it is the equipment.

The equipment lease is the mechanism

This is the part to understand before anything else. Merchants repeatedly describe hardware presented as free or included, then discovering it was financed through a separate agreement with a third party — Cascade Equipment Leasing and TimePayment are both named in the complaint record — as a strictly non-cancelable lease running 48 months, at monthly amounts reported as high as roughly $190.

Do the arithmetic on that. Forty-eight months at $190 is $9,120 for a terminal estate that would cost a few hundred dollars to buy. And because the lease is a separate contract with a separate company, closing the merchant account does not close it. A business that leaves Riverside, pays the termination fee and moves on can still be paying a leasing company every month for equipment it no longer uses, with no recourse under the processing agreement it just exited.

That structure is not unique to Riverside — it has been the standard trap in the ISO channel for three decades — but it is the specific mechanism the complaint record keeps returning to, and it is entirely avoidable. Ask whether any part of the hardware is leased. Ask who the lessor is. Ask for the term, the monthly payment and the total. Then buy the hardware outright instead.

The litigation

One federal case names the company. Menten v. Riverside Payments, Inc. et al, docket 6:25-cv-00336 in the District of Oregon, was brought against Riverside together with Cascade Equipment Leasing LLC and TimePayment Corp and reached federal court on 27 February 2025. It ended almost at once: the plaintiff filed a notice of voluntary dismissal the next day, and the case was terminated on 13 March 2025. Nothing was decided, no finding was made against any defendant, and we have not listed it among this review's legal actions for that reason.

It is worth mentioning only for its shape. A merchant suing the processor and both equipment-leasing companies in a single action is precisely the arrangement the BBB complaints describe over and over, and it shows how entangled the processing relationship and the hardware financing become once things go wrong.

What Riverside does well

The picture is not uniformly bad, and it would be unfair to present it that way. There are positive first-hand reviews on the BBB's own site praising customer service, technical support and responsiveness, and the hands-on model — a named local representative, on-site POS installation, someone who answers the phone — is genuinely valuable to a restaurant or retailer that does not want to configure a system itself. The offer to handle cancellation with a previous processor addresses a real problem, because processors make leaving deliberately hard.

The company has also operated under one name from one address since 2014, with no rebranding or corporate reshuffling to trace. In a channel where brands change every few years to shed a reputation, that counts for something.

The verdict

C+ is a legitimate ISO with real support staff and a real product range, whose sales model reliably produces the complaint pattern it produces. Riverside can be a perfectly good provider if you treat the sales appointment as a negotiation and refuse to leave it without documents: the complete rate and fee schedule attached to what you sign, written confirmation of whether any hardware is leased and on what terms, the exact terms of any buyout promise, and the term length and notice period.

The single decision that separates a satisfied Riverside merchant from an unhappy one is the equipment. Buy it outright. If a representative insists that free hardware requires a signature on a 48-month agreement with a leasing company you have never heard of, you already know what the next four years look like.