The Compaytence Brief
Payments intelligence for high-risk and high-growth merchants — processors, chargebacks, compliance and cross-border, every week.
10 Ways to Get Your Account Frozen in Q4
Holiday growth can trigger a processor review just as volume peaks. Ten things that get payouts restricted, delayed or frozen in Q4, from mismatched business documents to unannounced sales spikes, and how to prevent each.
PayPal, Shopify & Stripe Holds: Don’t Let Your Processor Keep the Cash
A 10% rolling reserve held for 90 days grows with your sales. How PayPal, Stripe and Shopify Payments reserves work, what triggers them, and four ways to reduce your chances of getting one.
Will Europe escape the American networks?
Wero, the bank-backed alternative to Visa and Mastercard, is now live at dm and Lidl checkouts. What its rollout numbers actually show, and how far it is from challenging the card networks.
Your MCC Sets the Tone
Your four-digit Merchant Category Code tells acquirers what kind of risk they are taking on. Which MCCs draw extra underwriting scrutiny, and why the business behind the code matters most.
Stop Defending, Start Preventing: The Merchant’s Guide to Chargeback Alerts
At $1 million a month, a 1.5% chargeback rate puts about $15,000 into disputes every month. How Ethoca, Verifi CDRN, RDR and Order Insight stop chargebacks before they land.
The Checkout Your Buyers Want
Merchants offering one relevant payment method beyond cards saw revenue rise 12% in Stripe's 2025 test. Why cards aren't the default in many markets, and how to find what your buyers expect.
Do you know what it costs to run your store?
Push your volume to $250,000 a month and you can easily pay over $12,000 a year in fees: Regulatory Product Fee, Network Access Fee, Industry Compliance Fee.
The Cost of Winning Chargebacks
A chargeback counts against your dispute ratio the moment it is filed, and the $15 to $30 gateway fee posts the same way. Merchants win 44.6% of the disputes they contest and net 10.7%, and neither number touches the two costs that already landed.
When Your Only Processor Goes Down, So Does Your Store
A two-hour Braintree outage took every checkout running through it down with no second rail to route to. An outage costs you hours, a shutdown costs you months, and 97% of merchants above $500M refuse to run one processor for exactly that reason.
The Local Acquiring Advantage
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.
Regulators Just Quantified the FX Markup You've Been Eating Blind
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.
What the Underwriters Want
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.