How placement actually works

1. 1

   You tell us what happened

   What you sell, how you bill, roughly what you process, and what your last processor did. If there is a termination letter, it is the single most useful document you have. Nothing about this stage costs anything or commits you to anything.

   What you do: Describe the business in plain terms, and send the termination letter or decline notice if one exists. Vague answers here cost time later, since a detail left out now usually surfaces during underwriting anyway.

   What we do: We listen for the specific pattern: a first-time application, a termination, a live MATCH listing, or an aggregator freeze. Each one points toward a different next step and a different set of acquirers worth approaching.

   What can go wrong here: A merchant leaves out a prior decline or a reason code, hoping it will not come up. It almost always comes up during the check, and finding out that way costs more trust than disclosing it here would have.

2. 2

   We read the file the way an underwriter will

   Statements, chargeback history, billing model, website and refund policy, and whether a MATCH listing exists. This is where problems get found: a descriptor nobody recognises, a claim on the site that no acquirer will board, a ratio that needs work first.

   What you do: Send whatever processing statements you have, even messy or partial ones, and give us access to the live website exactly as a customer would see it.

   What we do: We read the file the way the acquirer will, not the way a salesperson would. That means flagging a problem here, before an application goes anywhere, rather than letting an underwriter find it first.

   What can go wrong here: The website says something the business cannot actually stand behind, a delivery promise, a health claim, a guarantee, and it is the kind of thing that gets an application declined on sight regardless of the numbers.

3. 3

   You hear the honest read

   Which acquirers realistically board a business like yours, what they will want to see, and where your file is weak. If the honest answer is that something has to change before anyone will approve you, you hear that instead of a sales pitch.

   What you do: Ask the questions you actually want answered, including the uncomfortable ones. This is the point to push back if something does not make sense, before an application is built around it.

   What we do: We name the reason code or the specific weakness in plain language, and we say when the honest move is to fix something first rather than apply and collect another decline.

   What can go wrong here: Skipping this step and going straight to an application anyway. A file that goes out before a known problem is fixed usually comes back declined, and that decline becomes part of the record for the next attempt too.

4. 4

   The application goes to the right acquirers

   Not into a generic queue. Applications go to acquiring banks that deliberately underwrite your category, with the supporting documents packaged the way that acquirer expects them.

   What you do: Provide the documents from the checklist below completely, since a missing item is the most common reason a file sits rather than moves.

   What we do: We route the file to acquirers that actually board your category and package the documents the way that specific underwriter expects to see them, which shortens the review on their end.

   What can go wrong here: Sending the same file to a wide list of acquirers regardless of specialty wastes everyone’s time and can generate declines on record that hurt the next application. We do not do that.

5. 5

   Underwriting decides, and you see the terms in writing

   The acquiring bank makes the approval decision, not us and not you. If it approves, you get the full pricing schedule, including any reserve, in writing before you sign anything.

   What you do: Read the pricing schedule and reserve terms before signing, and ask about anything that is unclear. Once you sign, that agreement is what governs the relationship, not anything said in conversation before it.

   What we do: We make sure the schedule you receive is the schedule that was actually discussed, and we flag anything in it that looks off before you sign, not after.

   What can go wrong here: Signing without reading the reserve and fee terms closely. The relationship is governed by that document, and surprises found after signing are far harder to fix than questions asked before.

6. 6

   You go live, and you plan for next time

   Gateway connected, descriptor set properly, chargeback tooling in place. Most established high risk merchants then add a second account, so that one termination can never take the whole business offline again.

   What you do: Confirm the billing descriptor matches what a customer will recognize on their statement, and keep refund and shipping policies current as the business changes.

   What we do: We help make sure the gateway and descriptor are set correctly at launch, since a wrong descriptor is one of the more common, avoidable causes of early chargebacks.

   What can go wrong here: Treating go-live as the finish line. An account with no backup account and no chargeback monitoring is one bad month away from a repeat of the exact problem that brought the merchant here.

What happens after you are boarded

Boarding is not the end of underwriting, it is the start of ongoing monitoring. The acquirer keeps watching your chargeback ratio, your fraud rate and your processing volume against what was approved, and a meaningful shift in any of them can trigger a review.

Most established high risk merchants treat the months after go-live as their own monitoring period: watching the chargeback ratio, keeping the refund policy and website current as the business changes, and disclosing a real shift in products or volume before the acquirer finds it independently. A second merchant account at this stage is common precisely because one account, however well it is running, is still a single point of failure.

What we do not do

Being clear about the limits is the point of this page. We do not approve accounts: the acquiring bank does, every time. We do not promise approval, an approval rate or an approval time, and we would rather lose the enquiry than invent one.

We cannot remove a MATCH listing, because only the acquirer that placed a listing can, and only in narrow circumstances covered on our MATCH list removal page. We cannot release funds another processor is holding under its own agreement. And we do not publish a rate card, because no honest high risk rate exists before an underwriter has read your file. What you get instead is the full schedule in writing before you sign, which is covered on our fees page.