Weight the criteria for your business before you score anyone. A subscription company cares about recurring approval rates and card-updater coverage; a marketplace cares about split settlement and payout currencies; a travel merchant cares about fraud tooling and chargeback ratios.
Score each shortlisted provider from 1 to 5 on every criterion below, multiply by your weight and add it up. The exercise takes an afternoon, forces every provider to answer the same questions in writing, and removes most of the guesswork from a decision you will live with for years. We have ordered the criteria by how often they turn out to matter in practice — not by how often they appear in a sales deck.
Pricing transparency
Every provider will quote you a headline rate. The question is what sits behind it. Card fees are priced in one of three ways, and the model matters more than the number.
| Model | How it works | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Blended | One rate for every card, e.g. 1.9% + €0.20. Predictable, easy to reconcile, slightly dearer on debit. | Start-ups and merchants below roughly €50k a month. |
| Interchange++ | Interchange + scheme fee + the provider's mark-up, itemised on the invoice. Cheaper on domestic and debit cards. | Volume above €250k a month and finance teams that reconcile line by line. |
| Tiered | Transactions bucketed as "qualified" or "non-qualified" at the provider's discretion, after the fact. | Nobody. Opaque by design — walk away. |
Beyond the card rate, ask for the full fee schedule in writing: setup fee, monthly fee, monthly minimum, chargeback fee, refund fee, currency conversion mark-up, payout fee, PCI compliance fee, early termination fee and the rolling reserve. A provider that cannot produce this list on the first call is telling you something. For reference, Target's schedule fits on one page: 1.9% + €0.20 on Start with no monthly fee, from 1.4% + €0.20 on Business at €99 a month, interchange++ on Enterprise, €15 per chargeback and 0.5% on conversion. Non-EU cards add 1.0% — every provider has an equivalent line, so ask for it.
Conversion & routing
Approval rate is the number that decides whether a provider is cheap or expensive. Two providers charging 1.4% and 1.9% look half a point apart. If the cheaper one approves 82% of attempts and the dearer one 88%, the "expensive" provider puts roughly €5,500 more in your account on every €100,000 of attempted sales — after fees.
A three-point gap in approval rate is worth more than a half-point gap in the fee. Always run the maths on net revenue, not on the rate card.
Ask how routing works. A single acquiring bank means a single point of failure and a single approval profile. Multi-acquirer routing — Target connects 15+ partner banks and PSPs — lets the platform send each transaction to the acquirer most likely to approve it, based on card BIN, issuing country and currency, and retry a soft decline elsewhere in the same session. Ask for approval rates by card country and by issuer for your vertical, not a blended average across the provider's book. Then ask whether they support network tokens, account updater and 3-D Secure 2.2 with exemptions (transaction risk analysis, low value, trusted beneficiary). Each of those adds measurable points to conversion; together they are the difference between 82% and 88%.
Currencies & settlement
There are three separate currency questions, and providers tend to answer only one. Processing currency is what your customer sees at checkout. Settlement currency is what lands in your account. Conversion is who converts, at what rate, and on which day. Target processes 150+ currencies and settles in 25 — EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, PLN, CZK and AED among them. Ask every provider for the same two numbers and for the conversion mark-up as a percentage over the mid-market rate; ours is 0.5%.
Then ask about timing: T+1, T+2 or weekly, and whether it changes for non-EU cards or for your risk category. A settlement schedule that quietly moves to weekly for "review" is a cash-flow problem you will only discover in month two. Finally, ask about payouts. If you pay sellers, drivers, creators or affiliates, a provider that can only settle to your own bank account forces you to run a second system for payouts to cards, IBANs and e-wallets — a second contract, a second reconciliation, a second point of failure.
Fraud tooling
Fraud prevention is a trade-off between losses and false declines, and the tooling determines where you can set the dial. The minimum in 2026: a rules engine you can edit yourself (velocity, BIN, geography, amount, device), machine-learning scoring trained on the provider's whole network rather than your traffic alone, 3-D Secure 2.2 with a frictionless flow, chargeback alerts that arrive before the dispute does, and a dashboard that shows why a transaction was declined — by which rule, at which step.
Ask what the provider's chargeback ratio is across merchants like you and how long a rule change takes to go live: minutes from the dashboard, or a ticket to the risk team with a two-day turnaround. Ask who owns the scoring model. If it is licensed from a third party, your provider may not be able to tune it for your vertical, and "we will look into it" becomes the permanent answer.
Integration effort
Estimate integration honestly before you compare prices, because it dominates first-year cost. Three paths exist: a hosted payment page (hours, no PCI scope on your side), a plugin for your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop or Tilda — a day), or a direct API integration (one to two weeks of developer time, full control of the checkout).
Look at the documentation before you look at the pricing page. Is there a sandbox you can open today without a contract? Test cards for every scenario, including declines, 3-DS challenges and partial refunds? SDKs for your stack — Target ships JavaScript, Node.js, Python, PHP, Java and Kotlin/Swift? Webhooks with signatures and retries, and an idempotency key on payment creation? A provider that asks you to sign before you can see the API reference is asking you to buy blind.
Support & onboarding speed
Onboarding time is a proxy for how well the compliance team is run. Two to five business days from documents to a live merchant account is a realistic benchmark for a standard-risk business; three weeks is a sign that KYB is manual or outsourced. During the sales process, note how long each answer takes. Response times before you sign are the best response times you will ever see from that provider.
Ask whether support is 24/7 or business hours; whether you get a named manager or a queue; and whether the manager can actually change routing, limits and reserves, or only forward the request. On Target, Business and Enterprise merchants get a dedicated manager and support runs around the clock for everyone. Treat that as table stakes in your comparison, not as a differentiator.
Compliance
Compliance is where a bad choice costs the most. Check the basics first: PCI DSS Level 1 certification (ask for the current attestation of compliance, not the logo on the website), an EU or UK licence appropriate to the flow of funds — payment institution, e-money institution or bank — and a clear statement of whether your money sits in safeguarded client accounts. Understand how the provider applies PSD2 strong customer authentication and where cardholder data is stored.
Read the acceptable-use policy for your category. A provider that accepts you today and offboards you after a review in month three is more expensive than one that says no upfront. Finally, read the termination clause: the notice period, what happens to the rolling reserve, and how long funds are held after you leave. Ninety days is normal; one hundred and eighty with no stated release conditions is not.
Before you sign — the checklist
Send this list to every shortlisted provider and ask for written answers. Silence on any line is an answer too.
- Full fee schedule in writing, including reserve and termination terms
- Approval rates for your vertical, split by card country and issuer
- Number of acquiring banks and how routing decisions are made
- Processing and settlement currencies, conversion mark-up, settlement timing
- Editable rules engine, ML scoring, 3-DS 2.2 with exemptions, chargeback alerts
- Sandbox, test cards and API reference available before contract
- SDKs and plugins for your stack; signed webhooks with retries
- Onboarding timeline with a named owner on the provider's side
- Support hours, escalation path and the name of your manager
- Current PCI DSS attestation, licence, safeguarding and data residency
Conclusion
Pick the provider that wins on the criteria you weighted highest, not the one with the lowest headline rate. The rate is the easiest number to change in a negotiation and the least important one in your P&L; approval rate, settlement and support are what you will feel every month.
If you want to run this exercise on Target, our full fee schedule is on the pricing page, the sandbox opens without a contract, and the team will share approval-rate data for your vertical — write to us and ask for it. Onboarding takes 2–5 business days.