Understand
Payfac vs ISO — what’s the difference?
A payfac (payment facilitator) onboards merchants under its own contract and underwriting, as sub-merchants of its sponsoring acquirer. An ISO (independent sales organisation) introduces merchants to an acquirer and earns a commission — the merchant’s contract, underwriting and support all sit with the acquirer, not the ISO.
The structural difference
With an ISO, you are the acquirer’s customer; the ISO is a sales channel. With a payfac, you are the payfac’s customer; the acquirer sits behind it as infrastructure. That changes who answers the phone, who decides your underwriting, and how fast anything happens.
Neither model is inherently better. A good ISO can place hard cases with the right acquirer; a good payfac gives you one accountable counterparty and days-not-weeks onboarding. The failure modes differ too: an ISO can’t fix anything after the introduction, while a payfac inherits its sponsor’s constraints.
Questions that reveal which you’re dealing with
Ask: who is my contract with? Who underwrites me? Who do I call when settlements pause? If the answers are “the acquirer, the acquirer, and the acquirer” — you’re dealing with an ISO, whatever the branding says. If it’s one name for all three, you have a direct counterparty.
Then verify the counterparty the usual way: regulatory registrations you can check, structure explained without prompting, pricing categories named up front.
Put it to work
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