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Only 20% of cross-border sellers have a local acquirer in their best foreign market. Everyone else routes those sales through a home-country account that prices, routes, and declines them as foreign risk.

Cross-border card fees run about 15x domestic, and the currency markup stacked on top never shows up as a line item. Here's how to find what your international sales are really costing you.

Signing up with Stripe or Shopify isn't underwriting. It's a form. The real review comes later, and these are the eight things on the underwriter's desk when it does.

One terminated account can lock you out of card processing for five years, and take every other business you own down with it.

Daily orders at a growing store jump from 40 to 600 in 48 hours after a product takes off. By the third day, the payouts pause, a documentation request lands in the inbox, and the processor places a 10% rolling reserve on the store's revenue. Nothing went wrong with the business. That is the part most operators find hard to accept. To the processor's risk engine, a sudden surge in volume can look almost identical to a compromised account, and the response is the same either w

For years, the payment industry operated on a simple premise: if a processor decided to terminate a merchant account, it was a private risk decision. That premise changed on March 26, 2026, when the Federal Trade Commission issued warning letters to the CEOs of Stripe, PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard regarding merchant "debanking" practices. FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson explicitly notified these companies that terminating financial services without clear, fair guidelines coul

When a recurring subscription payment fails, the standard playbook is simple: let your billing recovery software retry the card. You set up a rule to retry the card every 24 hours, hoping to recover the transaction and save the customer. For a scaling eCommerce brand, this appears to be a simple way to protect recurring revenue. Behind the scenes, this simple automation is one of the quickest ways to trigger sudden processor shutdowns, rolling reserves, or payment disruptions

Subscription businesses enjoy one of the most attractive economics in commerce. Recurring revenue creates predictability, increases customer lifetime value, and reduces the constant pressure of acquiring new customers. Yet the same model introduces a challenge that many merchants underestimate: time. Months can pass between a customer's enrollment and a future billing event. During that period, people change cards, switch email addresses, overlook renewal notices, or simply f

Understanding the ever-evolving standards that shape merchant risk Every merchant agrees to card network rules when they start accepting payments. Those rules come with an expectation that merchants will maintain "acceptable" levels of fraud, chargebacks, disputes, and transaction quality. Visa and Mastercard, the major card networks, are continuously measuring those figures through a series of monitoring programs that operate behind the scenes. The catch is that "acceptable"

International eCommerce businesses have become significantly more sophisticated over the past decade. The financial infrastructure supporting them hasn't always kept pace. Today's merchants are managing supplier payments across multiple regions, advertising spend across numerous platforms, foreign exchange exposure, treasury balances, contractor payments, and increasingly, stablecoin transactions. As these operations scale, many businesses begin searching for a more centraliz

Starting in July 2026, Mastercard’s new Scam Merchant Monitoring Program (SMMP) will place far greater pressure on merchants, ISOs, PayFacs, and acquiring banks to identify scam-related activity before it escalates into widespread losses. Businesses that fail to understand these changes could face reserve increases, funding holds, enhanced underwriting reviews, or even sudden account termination with little warning. And unlike traditional fraud programs, SMMP is not centered

From Payment Processor to Financial Infrastructure Stripe built its reputation by expediting payments for any online business. They notoriously limit the hoops to jump through such as extensive underwriting before approval. Merchants could card-process and accept payments globally with far less friction than other processors using Stripe’s services. But over the past year, Stripe has made a series of acquisitions and product expansions that suggest a much larger ambition: The

The Rundown Stripe is making a change. In recent weeks, the processing giant has amended its previous strictures on high-risk merchants, now offering services to the CBD, dating and gambling markets. Prior to the second quarter of the year, Stripe was not approving businesses selling products like these. To steepen competition with stricter processors, they’ve now thrown their hat in the ring. At first glance, this surprising turn is attractive, especially for those in volati

The Situation A new wave of layoffs has hit big tech hard. According to CNBC, companies like Meta and Microsoft have cut tens of thousands of jobs, with AI at the center of the conversation. And cost-cutting is just the tip of the iceberg. Programming efficiency is exponentially higher with the assistance of artificial intelligence. And it isn’t the first time the industry has seen a rollout like this. Months earlier, Klarna made headlines for aggressively leaning into AI, re

Imagine you set up autopay for your gym membership. Every month, money leaves your account without you thinking about it. Now imagine your bank suddenly says, “Before every automatic charge, we’re going to double check with you.” That’s the basis of a recent shift in payments. According to an article in The Economic Times, India’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, has introduced new rules for cross border recurring payments. These are things like subscriptions, softwar

The One-Man Powerhouse At one point, every business was a start-up. Some ascended to astronomical revenue quickly, others simmered for years before seeing any growth. But all of them had to invest money in human resources to generate income. Until now. Discussed in a recent article by The New York Times, entrepreneur Matthew Gallagher created his own telehealth provider, Medvi, offering weight loss pills to consumers. He identified a critical global issue and capitalized on

The Situation: Since the United States of America declared war on Iran, a significant exchange route of oil and gas was immediately cut off, limiting access to the essential resource for countries across the globe. Overnight, figures have nearly doubled in price per gallon across the US in places like California, Hawaii and Washington. As high as $7.00. It isn’t just America feeling the effect. Other territories like Singapore and Hong Kong, popular goods exports, also face r

What Are Algorithms? Algorithms. A word frequently used by social media users in the digital age. And these network patterns are quickly becoming a point of emphasis for consumers online. Algorithms have become so relevant in fact, that even seniors know how to identify and use them. Data gathered by industry insider PYMNTS determines digital transactions often occur on continuous mobile phone sessions, oftentimes between app jumps between Instagram, Amazon Prime and mobile

The Big Change A dramatic structural shift is occurring across processing giants like Stripe, Paypal and Shopify. Around the globe, payment companies are tightening their grip on not just small business, but the industry at large. Account shutdowns, delayed payouts and even top-down processing blockages have been increasingly common. But why is this happening? It appears the qualifications for these services have become stricter, resulting in deeper front-end vetting by merch

Not all algorithmic pricing is created equal. For many eCommerce founders, pricing automation sounds like a smart way to protect margins and respond to market demand. But the version drawing the most government scrutiny is more specific - and more controversial. It's the use of consumer data to predict how much a particular shopper is willing to pay, then raising the price accordingly. If an algorithm decides someone is wealthy, urgently needs a product, or is unlikely to aba