Flagged high risk, or actually high risk?
Two very different businesses search this phrase and only one of them belongs here. If you sell gambling, adult content, crypto, CBD, nutraceuticals, lending or MLM, we are prohibited from taking it and no part of this page changes that. If you sell ordinary software or digital goods and an acquirer still labelled you high risk — because you are cross-border, subscription-based, delivering instantly, or simply new — then the label is about structure, not about you, and the Merchant of Record model removes the thing being flagged.
Why ordinary digital sellers get the label anyway
- Instant, intangible delivery
- There is no parcel to recall and no signature to produce as evidence, so an acquirer prices in that a disputed sale is usually a lost one. That is true of every download and every licence key, which makes it a property of the category rather than a judgement about your business.
- Card-not-present, buyer anywhere
- A checkout open to 150+ countries is a wider fraud surface than one serving a single domestic market, and issuers in some of those countries decline more readily. Reach and risk scores move together, which is awkward when reach is the entire point.
- Recurring billing
- Subscriptions generate disputes long after the first charge, from buyers who forgot they subscribed. Underwriters treat future-dated liability as exposure they may have to cover, and price or reserve against it.
- No processing history
- A company incorporated last year with no volume behind it cannot be assessed on its record, so it is assessed on its category. New and digital reads as risky by default, whatever the product turns out to be.
- Chargeback ratios you did not cause
- Card testing — bots running stolen numbers against any checkout they can find — inflates the ratio that gets you reviewed. The attack is aimed at the card, not at you, but it lands on your account.
- A founder or a bank in the wrong place
- Some acquirers score the country of the entity or the payout account rather than the product. Perfectly ordinary software businesses get declined for where they were registered.
What changes when we are the merchant
- 01
The underwritten merchant becomes us
You do not apply for a merchant account, so nothing about your entity, your age or your country goes to an underwriter. We hold the acquiring relationships and you own a connected sub-account beneath ours that receives your money. The ecommerce merchant account page covers that arrangement in detail.
- 02
Disputes land on us, not on your ratio
We are the seller of record on every transaction, so chargebacks come to us and are handled by us. There is no merchant account of yours accumulating a ratio, and no acquirer of yours deciding you have crossed a threshold.
- 03
Screening runs before the charge settles
Fraud checks sit in front of the payment rather than in a report you read afterwards, which is what stops card testing turning into a dispute pile. The fraud detection page explains how that screening treats goods that are gone the second they are paid for.
- 04
You still get verified — properly
Every workspace is checked before it can sell, because as Merchant of Record we carry the liability and the card networks require it of us. Approval is usually within a day. This is the honest trade: less scrutiny of your balance sheet, more of what you actually sell.
Where the line is, and what sits on the wrong side of it
The prohibited categories are not negotiable
Gambling and betting, including games of skill with prizes and sports forecasting. Adult content and services. Cryptocurrency, including mining, staking and secondary NFT sales. Cannabis and high-THC CBD. Nutraceuticals and pseudo-pharmaceuticals. Debt relief, credit repair, collections and payday lending. MLM and get-rich-quick schemes. Weapons and dangerous materials. Travel and tourism services. These are in the published policy, and verification is where they are caught.
Digital only, on both sides of the line
We do not handle physical goods at all, whatever the category. If a buyer receives an object, or redeems something in person on a date, it is outside this platform regardless of how low-risk the business is otherwise.
If your vertical is prohibited, use a high-risk acquirer
Specialist high-risk providers exist for exactly these categories. Expect to pay several times our rate, sign for a rolling reserve against future liabilities, and provide financials. That pricing reflects genuine exposure, and it is a market we are not going to pretend to serve.
Ask before you build, not after
Some models sit near an edge rather than over it — a platform distributing third-party creators' content is the common one, and it needs an individual review. A straight answer now costs an email. Finding out at verification costs you a launch.
What sellers say once they have switched
★★★★★ 4.8/5 from 10 reviews on G2 →
Vadim Finayev “We work with quite a few merchants of record, but none comes close to the support and speed of implementation of Fungies. If you want a payment partner that actually gives you the feeling they want to work with you — rather than leaving you on read for three days or randomly restricting your account — you are in the right place.”
David Elliott “I researched the options and Fungies was the best fit for functionality and customisation within a store builder you can connect to your own domain. Taking a small percentage of sales, instead of charging a subscription for every environment and plugin, is refreshing.”
Elnura Abdimanap Kyzy “The platform is user-friendly, integrates easily with APIs and webhooks, and simplifies managing digital products and subscriptions. We were up and running quickly and support has been responsive throughout. Fungies is clearly tailored to the needs of SaaS businesses.”
Francisco Magnone Rienzi “Fungies has been a great partner — fast setup, competitive pricing, and real humans providing quick answers. They are constantly rolling out new features, and I am excited to see what is next.”
The questions people actually arrive with
How money reaches you, and what happens on the way.
Find out in a day, not after a launch
If your product is software or digital goods and the label came from how you sell rather than what you sell, verification will tell you quickly. If it is on the prohibited list, we would rather you knew that now.