Checkout.com: payments, acquiring, payouts and merchant controls

Checkout.com supplies a payment gateway, processing and domestic and international acquiring, with fraud tools and reconciliation around those services. Its potential brokerage role is the movement and administration of customer payments, with payment methods and acquiring arrangements determined for the merchant’s business.[1]

Its eligibility policy places securities, options, futures including forex, money transmission and virtual-currency activities in restricted categories requiring additional underwriting and due diligence. This permits case-by-case consideration; it does not establish automatic acceptance for a broker, exchange or trading business. Prohibited activities are a separate category.[8]

The use policy also expressly requires approval for proprietary trading firms. An approval for one activity should therefore not be read as permission for a materially different trading business.[9]

For Intelligent Acceptance, the service terms permit automatic enrolment in additional chargeable services and say optimisation does not guarantee outcomes. Fraud-tool acceptance or cancellation responsibility remains with the merchant.[12]

API authentication separates public client-side keys from secret server-side credentials and OAuth 2.0 access. Supported authentication depends on the endpoint; a public key has a limited client-side purpose. This separation matters when a broker embeds a payment component while its own server creates payments, processes events and updates its ledger.[16]

The Forex API returns indicative rates for daily acquiring, scheme acquiring and card payouts. Requests specify the product, currency pairs and processing channel, with a scheme where applicable; a disabled product returns HTTP 403. This is payment-conversion information. It does not establish a service for executing leveraged FX trades or supplying broker liquidity.[38]

Processing prices are negotiated for the business profile and category. Checkout.com offers flat-rate or interchange++ structures, the latter separating interchange, card-association and processor components. Its pricing page states no setup or account-maintenance fees and describes migration, integration and account-management support. Those statements do not make every optional service or risk-related charge free.[10]

Chargeback liability survives termination; recovery can use acquired funds, reserves, collateral or invoices. Reserve amounts and retention can change with risk assessment, and reserves can remain until liabilities expire or are fulfilled.[12]

A requested reserve reduction triggers a new credit-risk review. Checkout.com asks for current audited annual and interim financial statements, with specified exceptions; a non-public company unable to supply audited annual statements can provide three months of current bank statements. Approval can release excess collateral, but reassessment may also increase the reserve. There is no universal published reserve percentage for brokers.[32]

Merchant onboarding verifies the legal business, industry, bank account, payment websites and intended selling countries. Financial institutions may need their operating licence. Checkout.com’s shareholder-structure requirements cover intermediate and parent entities and ultimate owners with at least 25% of shares or voting rights. UK documentation must be signed by an appropriate senior officer and dated within three months; EEA documentation has certification requirements, including external certification for French companies. Automatic bank verification may avoid a bank statement, while failed verification requires further evidence.[23]

Technical deployment can use a hosted payment page, a payment link generated through the Dashboard or API, embedded Flow components or mobile SDKs. Flow can adapt the methods displayed to the customer’s geography, currency and device. A sandbox supports integration work, but the choice of interface does not itself complete commercial onboarding or establish a production launch date.[2]

Vault’s Forward API can route stored credentials to another payment provider or an authorised operational endpoint, including a fraud service or CRM. It uses provider-agnostic or network tokens and can operate without Checkout.com acquiring. This offers a way to separate credential storage from the processor used for a particular payment.[4]

The Dashboard includes an AI support agent described as available around the clock. Its published guidance asks for the payment or payout identifier when investigating a transaction and offers handoff to a live agent. The 24/7 statement concerns the AI tool; the article does not publish a universal human-response or resolution commitment.[33]

Service-status information appears under Dashboard support and includes both Checkout.com and third-party incidents. Categories distinguish degraded performance, partial outage and major outage. Notification emails identify the affected service, likely integration impact, required action and the expected next update. This gives operations teams an incident channel alongside transaction-specific support.[34]

The brand operates through jurisdiction-specific entities. Its Country Terms also distinguish US bank-sponsored arrangements from the separate MALPB and money-transmission services; the selected agreement and service identify the counterparty.[13]

Checkout.com announced that US direct acquiring through its Georgia MALPB became operational on 9 September 2026. That announcement supersedes earlier statements that processing was still planned. It does not say that every US merchant or payment service has moved to that route.[39]

The UK policy explains that a merchant electronic-money account is not a deposit or savings account and does not receive Financial Services Compensation Scheme protection. It describes safeguarding through separate bank accounts. That distinction concerns the payment account; it is not evidence that a broker has met the separate client-money obligations applying to its trading business.[9]

The Third Party Payment terms leave recipient sanctions screening, continuing monitoring and other legally required due diligence with the merchant.[12]

The privacy notice distinguishes Checkout.com’s own controller processing from activities carried out as a merchant’s processor. General retention follows the purposes and legal requirements for the data, followed by secure erasure when no longer needed. International transfers may use EU standard clauses and the UK Addendum with transfer assessments. Checkout.com reports PCI DSS Level 1 compliance and ISO 27001 certification. Its separate biometric rule requires deletion no later than 365 days after provision; this is not a deletion deadline for all payment records.[26]

Checkout.com dates its launch to 2012 and identifies London as its headquarters. Its published history records proprietary authorisation and clearing platforms in 2016, the ProcessOut and Pin Payments acquisitions in 2020, and the acquisition of identity-verification business Ubble in 2022. Issuing and Intelligent Acceptance followed in 2023, with standalone Vault, Forward API and Flow in 2024. These milestones explain the wider product range around acquiring.[35]

The February 2026 results announcement identifies founder Guillaume Pousaz as CEO. Checkout.com reported more than $300 billion of payment volume in 2025, over 1,000 enterprise merchants and full-year EBITDA profitability. These are company-reported operating figures, rather than a contractual reliability measure for a particular merchant.[36]

Georgia’s banking regulator separately records approval of the Checkout.com MALPB application during 2025. Approval and operational launch were different stages, as the subsequent September 2026 announcement makes clear.[40][39]

Operator

Jurisdiction-specific Checkout.com entities, including Checkout Ltd, Checkout SAS and Checkout APAC Pte. Ltd.

Service scope

Online payments, acquiring, payouts, payment credentials, fraud controls, identity verification and card issuing; financial-business acceptance is subject to approval.

Customer types

Enterprise digital merchants; Fintechs; Approved financial-services businesses

Delivery

SaaS; API

Pricing publication

Public and quoted pricing

Headquarters

London, United Kingdom

Platforms

Unified Payments API; Flow; Payouts; Vault; Intelligent Acceptance; Identity Verification; Issuing

Integrations

Visa Direct; Mastercard Send; ComplyAdvantage; SSO identity providers

Pricing scope

Processing is quoted; conditional PCI non-compliance fees have a public USD schedule.

Implementation

Business underwriting, regional entity verification, payment integration and role-based Dashboard access.

Support

Dashboard support and AI assistance, human handoff, support email and service-status notifications.

Permissions and regulatory scope

Permissions attach to the relevant payment entity and service; merchant approval is separate from the broker’s own regulatory obligations.

Provider metadata checked 20 Oct 2026Source 2Source 5Source 37Source 13Source 8Source 6Source 34Source 7Source 23Source 3Source 11Source 10Source 1Source 36Source 25Source 33Source 39Source 4

For regions that have migrated to the newer balances and reporting system, Checkout.com says Dashboard-generated reports cannot reconcile the migration month or earlier periods. SFTP or the Reports API should be used for those periods. This is a defined migration boundary, so historical finance workflows cannot simply assume the newest Dashboard view covers the complete record.[29]

For Vault data, the terms identify the merchant as controller and Checkout.com as processor. They provide for deletion on request and promptly after termination. Forwarding requires a compliant destination; Checkout.com can refuse transfers under its legal and internal-control criteria.[12]

Under the US MALPB terms, the merchant must maintain the agreed depository bank account throughout the agreement and for at least 180 days after termination. Closing the processing relationship therefore does not immediately end that bank-account requirement.[13]

The reporting guide distinguishes Available, Pending, Payable and Collateral balances. Escalating a discrepancy with the entity, sub-account, currency, period, transaction identifiers and original reports allows support to investigate the actual financial movement, rather than a comparison between unlike totals.[30]