.png){kind=small}
High-risk payment processors are vital to the success of a growing number of modern industries. Businesses like CBD retailers, adult entertainment, and online betting platforms struggle to find traditional payment processors that will support them at all, let alone provide them with the specialized service that they need to account for unique externalities like high chargeback, refund, and fraud rates.
Our third-party research team analyzed over 35 payment processing firms to find the top high-risk payment processing companies, and ranked them based on the following criteria:
- Value Score: A 1.0-5.0 score that we use to summarize the overall value proposition of a payment processor based on factors like pricing, fee transparency, industries served, security, ease of use, and more.
- Year Established: While it isn’t too heavily weighted in our algorithm, companies with a longer tenure in such a young industry get a small bump in our ranking algorithm as they’ve demonstrated an ability to serve a variety of high-risk clients over a long period of time.
- High-Risk Specialization: Payment processors that work with high-risk clients aren’t always specialists, which often limits their ability to manage externalities for high-risk clients like low approval rates, higher chargeback and refund rates in a timely manner.
- Dedicated Account Manager: Payment processing is a complex process, and issues need to be resolved quickly to avoid significant losses. Companies that guarantee a dedicated account manager get priority because they improve support access and quality.
- Instant Onboarding: High-risk clients often struggle to find the right processor, so processors with instant onboarding get a bump for providing an easy transition for businesses that can’t afford downtime.
Below are our rankings of the top high-risk payment processing companies after considering all of the factors above, including their client specialty:
The Top High-Risk Payment Processing Companies of 2025
Seamless Chex
Seamless Chex is the most versatile high-risk specialist processor on the list. They support the widest variety of industries, boast a 99.1% acceptance rate, and offer specialized services custom-tailored to their high-risk clientele like upfront underwriting and fast approvals, chargeback management, enhanced fraud protection, exceptionally rigid PCI-DSS security standards, rapid dispute regulation, and more. Their fees are minimal and transparent, and they provide exceptional scalability as a result of all of these value-adds. Everything about Seamless Chex is intentionally designed to meet the needs of high-risk clients and provide more value than generalist processors that simply accommodate a few high-risk industries and do no underwriting to ensure long-term viability.
Dedicated account managers and instant onboarding are bare minimum expectations for SC, and they are both available for every client that works with them to guarantee seamless transitions and fast solutions to even more complex issues. When combined with all of their more unique features and services, this makes Seamlesschex the best all-round high risk payment processor on the list.
- Value Score: 4.8
- Year Established: 2012
- High-Risk Specialization: Yes
- Dedicated Account Manager: Yes
- Instant Onboarding: Yes
- Contact: SeamlessChex website
PaymentCloud
PaymentCloud is another high-risk specialty payment processor that offers dedicated account managers, but they do not offer instant onboarding. As far as their unique specialty and value, they also offer chargeback and fraud protection, and they offer a unique surcharge program that allows businesses to pass their payment processing costs onto customers automatically, reducing the upfront cost of transition.
Where they struggle a bit is in high-volume applications, with reviews and notable outlets reporting that some of their clients have struggled with transaction volume restrictions, frustrating holds or freezes during busy seasons, and hidden fees.
- Value Score: 4.6
- Year Established: 2015
- High-Risk Specialization: Yes
- Dedicated Account Manager: Yes
- Instant Onboarding: No
- Contact: PaymentCloud website
SoarPay
SoarPay offers much of what SeamlessChex and PaymentCloud do, and they also offer competitive rates and transparent fees. The reason they are a bit further down the list, though, is that they exclude “ultra-high-risk” industries from their services, which compromises their value as a high-risk specialist processor. These industries include adult entertainment, gambling (other than sports betting & fantasy), bitcoin, offshore businesses, and more.
As a result, they advertise themselves as a “mid-risk” processor and can still be a good fit for businesses willing to operate around this obstacle.
- Value Score: 4.3
- Year Established: 2015
- High-Risk Specialization: Yes
- Dedicated Account Manager: Yes
- Instant Onboarding: No
- Contact: SoarPay website
Stax Payments
Stax Payments is a generalist payment processor with a unique subscription model that many companies appreciate, though it doesn’t always lead to cheaper service. They offer tiered subscriptions, with dedicated account managers being offered only to Ultimate subscribers and above. While this may erk some clients, there is still a way to guarantee the service, so we credit them for it on this list, though their Value Score does take a small hit for only offering it at these higher price points.
They do serve a number of high-risk industries, but are not a specialist, so their payment processing doesn’t offer many of the valuable features that specialty processors do. They do make a decent partner for firms looking for their subscription-style pricing that don’t mind missing out on more specialized services.
- Value Score: 3.9
- Year Established: 2014
- High-Risk Specialization: No
- Dedicated Account Manager: Sometimes
- Instant Onboarding: No
- Contact: Stax Payments website
Stripe
Stripe is undoubtedly the largest firm on the list, and the most well-known, but they are not exceptionally well-built for high-risk industries. What they do excel at, though, are small e-commerce businesses in the few high-risk industries that they will serve. They offer all of the benefits of a premium generalist processor, but it comes with all of their drawbacks as well.
These include a lack of dedicated account managers and opaque underwriting processes that leave some businesses convinced they are eligible for Stripe’s services until they are auto-flagged by their backend. Since Stripe doesn’t do underwriting up-front, it can take days, weeks, or months to finally discover that they weren’t the right fit and an automatic flag has frozen or shut down their merchant account, which eats up valuable time.
- Value Score: 3.7
- Year Established: 2010
- High-Risk Specialization: No
- Dedicated Account Manager: No
- Instant Onboarding: Yes
- Contact: Stripe website
