How to switch processors without breaking anything.

Before you sign anything

Four checks. All of them are cheaper to do now than to discover later.

1. What does leaving your current provider cost? Read the agreement for an early termination fee, an equipment lease, and the notice period. These are three separate things and a provider can have all three. More on this here.

2. Who owns your terminals? Owned outright, you can often take them. Leased, the lease usually survives the switch — you keep paying for hardware you are no longer using unless you end the lease separately, and lease agreements are frequently with a third company and deliberately hard to exit.

3. Will your hardware work on the new processor? Get a yes or no on your exact models, in writing. “Probably” is not an answer. Some terminals reprogram over the air in minutes; others are locked.

4. What has to be re-integrated? Your point-of-sale, your ecommerce platform, your invoicing, your gateway, any recurring billing. Recurring billing is the one that catches people — card data held by the old gateway may need a formal, secure migration, and that takes planning, not an afternoon.

The order that works

Get the quote in writing, in comparable form. Markup over interchange, per-item fee, and every fixed monthly charge. If you cannot put it next to your current statement and get one number each, you do not have a quote yet.

Apply, with complete paperwork. Typically: business formation documents, ownership ID, a bank statement or voided check, and a recent processing statement. Incomplete paperwork is the most common delay, and it is entirely in your control.

Underwrite and approve. A few business days when nothing is unusual. Longer if your industry is higher risk, your volume is new, or ownership is complicated.

Set up and test — with the old account still open. Terminals arrive or are reprogrammed, integrations are reconnected, and you run a small real transaction and confirm it settles into the right bank account. Do not skip the settlement check: an approval is not proof that the money arrives where you think.

Run both for a few days. Not strictly necessary, but it costs nothing if the new account has no monthly fee, and it means any surprise happens while you still have a working fallback.

Then cancel, in writing, the way the contract specifies. Email if that is what it says. Certified mail if that is what it says. Keep the confirmation.

Check the old account’s next statement. Cancellations that were accepted on the phone do not always get processed. Watch for one more month of fees, and for a lease that is still billing.

The three things that actually go wrong

The lease nobody read. The processing agreement is cancelled, the equipment lease is not, and a separate company keeps drawing a monthly payment for years. Check the lease before you do anything else.

Recurring billing left behind. Stored cards do not move themselves. If you bill customers on a schedule, settle how that data migrates before you switch, or you will be asking your customers to re-enter card details — and a meaningful share of them simply will not.

The quote that was not the price. Introductory rates that step up, “non-qualified” tiers that most of your cards land in, fixed fees mentioned only in the agreement. The defense is the same as always: insist on markup over interchange, and ask directly whether any rate on the quote changes after a period.

A note on timing

Switch at the start of a month if you can, and not during your busiest week. If you have an annual fee, find out which month it bills — leaving the month after you have just paid it is a real cost that nobody mentions.

What we charge

Interchange + 0.50% + 10¢ in person, interchange + 0.75% + 25¢ keyed. No contract, no monthly fee, no PCI fee, so there is no early termination fee to worry about the next time you want to leave.

If you want to know whether switching is worth it at all, send us a recent statement and we will mark it up against our pricing and tell you the monthly difference. If the difference does not cover what leaving costs you, we will say so.