Methodology
This directory exists to help merchants compare high-risk payment providers on evidence rather than marketing. For every PSP we track we separate what the provider claims from what we can independently verify and from what merchants who actually processed with them report — real fees, rolling reserves, settlement times and fund-hold track records.
Three kinds of fact
Every data point in the directory carries a source label so you know how much weight it deserves. We never blend them.
- Vendor-stated
- What the provider says about itself -headline rates, claimed settlement windows, licences it advertises. Useful as a starting point, but unverified. Treat it as a claim, not a fact.
- Independently verified
- Facts we confirmed against a primary source: a regulator’s public register, a corporate registry, or a document we could inspect. When a claim and the register disagree, we say so.
- Merchant-reported
- Aggregated from the experiences of merchants who have actually processed with the provider -real settlement times, real reserve behaviour, real fund holds. This is where claims meet reality.
How we verify licensing and corporate records
When a provider advertises a licence, we check the claim against the regulator’s public register and against the corporate registry where the entity is incorporated. Each check is recorded as confirmed, not found, or a mismatch, and we flag when a provider’s stated founding year disagrees with the incorporation date on record. A licence a provider talks about but that we cannot find on a register is labelled as exactly that — a claim, not a verified fact.
How the trust score works
The Top Reputation score rewards evidence, not spend. Structural signals dominate — domain age, confirmed licensing, and whether the site is actually live and serving traffic. Merchant reviews adjust the score through a volume-weighted sentiment ratio, so a single angry post does not sink an established processor and a handful of planted praise cannot lift an unknown one. Only serious incidents — fund holds, sudden shutdowns, sanctions — apply a real penalty, and the absence of data is never rewarded as though it were a clean record.
Live monitoring and external mentions
Beyond the static record we watch each provider’s operational vitals — whether the domain resolves, the site responds, and the SSL certificate is valid — and we scan public sources for new mentions of every provider we track. Discovered mentions are classified and only published after a human reviews them. Nothing reaches a provider’s page automatically.
Anonymity by design
Merchant reports are anonymous, and we built the database so they cannot be de-anonymised. We store no reporter name, email, or company on merchant reports -those columns do not exist. Summaries and quotes are anonymised before they are ever saved. Protecting the people who tell us the truth is the only way to keep getting it.
Our policy
Money buys visibility. It never buys veracity.
No provider can pay to change a rating, hide an incident, or alter a verification result. There are no paid placements, ever. The only thing a subscription unlocks is access -for you, the reader -to the full record.