Sola Review

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 and being acquired by the private equity firm H.I.G. in 2017. 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.

An old company with a new name

Sola is what you get when a 1996 merchant-services business and the gateway it built in 2013 decide to stop being two brands. Fidelity Payment Services started as a retail ISO agent for Heartland Payments, became a registered ISO with First Data in 2008, expanded into Canada in 2010, launched the Cardknox gateway and an ACH product in 2013, and was acquired by the private equity firm H.I.G. in 2017. In October 2024 the processing arm and the gateway were consolidated under the name Sola, with Michael Reed brought in as chief executive and the previous chief executive, David Ilowitz, moving to chairman. The rebrand announcement, dated 25 October 2024, described the company as serving tens of thousands of merchants across a variety of industries; it put no volume figure in public.

None of that history is decoration. It explains why Sola behaves less like a merchant-services shop and more like a payments platform with a sales force attached: it has owned a gateway for over a decade, and it sells to software companies as seriously as it sells to merchants.

The gateway is the point

Most companies at this level of the market resell processing and rent a gateway from a third party. When an integration breaks, the merchant discovers that the reseller, the processor and the gateway vendor are three companies with three support queues and no shared incentive. Sola built Cardknox itself, and has sold it as a standalone gateway to merchants who process elsewhere — which is unusual, and which is why the technical surface is deeper than the company's size would suggest: hosted checkout, tokenisation, 3D Secure 2.0, fraud screening, a card updater, terminal SDKs, cart plugins, and gateway emulation, which lets a merchant point an existing integration at Cardknox without rewriting it.

That last feature deserves its own sentence, because it is the practical answer to the single biggest reason merchants stay on bad processing: the integration is expensive to move. Emulation makes moving cheaper. It is also, in fairness, standard among serious gateways rather than unique to Sola.

What is not published

Everything about the money. There are no rates on the site, no monthly fee, no hardware prices, no contract length, no notice period and no cancellation terms. Pricing is set per account by the sales team, offered either as a flat rate or a custom structure. This is the industry norm rather than a particular sin, but it is also the reason a company like this cannot grade above a B here whatever else it does well: a merchant cannot compare what a merchant cannot see, and the outcome depends on how hard the buyer pushes.

The one public number is unhelpful in an instructive way. CardFellow's review records a $295 early-termination fee that surfaced in a Better Business Bureau complaint, where the merchant disputed owing it. That is a single disputed data point, not a published policy, and it should be treated as a prompt to ask rather than as the fee. Ask for the term, the auto-renewal notice period, the termination fee and — most important — whether any terminal is sold or leased. Equipment leases are where merchant-services agreements do their real damage, and they outlive the processing contract.

The complaint record

It is quiet, and quiet is worth something. The Better Business Bureau rates the company A+, though it has not accredited it, and CardFellow counts two BBB complaints closed in the preceding three years — one billing, one service — with nothing on Yelp or Ripoff Report. Against a base the company describes as tens of thousands of merchants, that is a low rate. The honest caveat is that a thin record is thin in both directions: there is not enough independent merchant feedback here to build a strong positive case either, and the rebrand has made the evidence harder to find by splitting it across three names. The BBB itself still files the company as Fidelity Payment Services, with a chief executive who left the role in 2024.

Read the footer

The most useful sentence on Sola's website is in the small print: it is a registered Independent Sales Organization of Citizens Bank, N.A., Providence, RI, and Elavon, Inc., Georgia. That tells a merchant what the company actually is. Sola sells, prices, supports and owns the gateway; the underlying processing settles on partner rails. It is a perfectly sound structure and the one most companies of this size use. It matters because it tells you where an escalation ends up, and because it means the rate you are quoted is a margin over somebody else's cost rather than a cost of its own — which is precisely why interchange-plus pricing, where that margin is visible, is the thing to insist on.

The verdict

B. A long-established reseller with a real gateway of its own, a credible embedded-payments story, a support structure built for integrators and a complaint record notably quieter than its peers. Held at B by the same thing that holds most of its peers there: no published price, no published contract terms, and a sales-led process in which the merchant's outcome depends on the merchant's own homework. Worth a quote — particularly if you are a software platform, or a merchant with an integration you would rather not rebuild — provided you get interchange-plus, the term and the termination fee in writing before you sign anything.