weAudit.com
Processor Rating No. 009 · The Anti-Brochure Series
Clearent
now Xplor Pay
now Xplor Pay
A legal record most processors would envy, a cancellation file most merchants wouldn’t believe, and a growth model built on software partnerships that hand it merchants who never chose it.
weAUDIT SCORE
56
OUT OF 100
Scored under the weAudit Rating Methodology · Last updated July 2026 · Every claim linked to its source
Regulatory & Legal Record25/25
Fee Practices & Contract Terms9/25
Complaints & Resolution8/20
Corporate Transparency9/15
Sales Channel Conduct5/15
Company Snapshot
Who you’re actually signing with
If your statement says Clearent, Clearent by Xplor, or Xplor Pay, this page is about your processor. Same company, three names in about four years.
Company
Founded 2005 in the St. Louis area as a direct processor serving merchants, ISOs, and financial institutions, with heavy distribution through software vendors that embed its payments into their products. Company profile
Scale
Independent analysis reports over $31 billion in annual processing across more than 66,000 businesses, much of it through software partnerships. Volume analysis
Ownership
Private equity firm Advent International acquired Clearent in 2018, merged it with FieldEdge, then combined it with Transaction Services Group in 2021 to form Xplor Technologies. The processing brand has since moved from Clearent to Clearent by Xplor to Xplor Pay. Ownership history · Rebrand confirmation
Credit where due
Independent auditors describe Clearent’s interchange-plus statements as genuinely readable, with full interchange category breakdowns and built-in Level 2 and Level 3 optimization for B2B accounts. In an industry that hides the biggest number on the page, that transparency is real and this rating credits it. Statement transparency analysis
The Headline Finding
Easy to sign. Documented as very hard to leave.
Clearent’s legal record is clean enough to score a perfect 25 in our first category. Its conduct at the exit, and the locked doors it grows behind, are why the total is a 56. The documented pattern:
The $395 exit fee, including where no signed agreement was produced
Merchant records repeatedly document a $395 early termination fee, and the disputes around it follow a script: merchants stating they never received a merchant agreement, one BBB complainant reporting the company produced a copy the merchant had not signed, and another billed $395 per account, $790 total, after being told to simply submit a closure form, with no mention of any fee. The company’s own responses in the BBB record confirm the fee, pointing merchants to terms stating accounts “may be subject to” early termination charges.
SOURCES: BBB complaint records with company responses · Documented merchant accounts
Billing that survives the account
The most serious documented cases involve money leaving merchant bank accounts after cancellation: one business discovered it had been charged monthly for over two years on an account it believed closed in 2022, nearly $3,000 in total, after its cancellation closed only one of two merchant accounts. The documented runaround included support directing the merchant to a sales rep who no longer worked at the company, closure forms reportedly submitted and “not received” through at least six attempts, and, in a separate account, a $69.95 monthly “account maintenance fee” continuing past the end of a contract.
SOURCES: BBB complaint records · Post-contract billing accounts
Category 1 of 5
Regulatory & Legal Record25 / 25
A perfect score, earned on the record: our review located no FTC actions, no state attorney general enforcement, no card network fines, and no merchant class actions against Clearent. Two commercial suits appear in the record for completeness (a 2015 breach of contract action by Eastward Capital Partners, and a 2022 matter, Mr. JJ, LLC v. Clearent), and neither is a merchant class claim, so neither is scored. We note this category measures what has been proven or formally alleged in enforcement and litigation, not what merchants experience day to day. The rest of this page measures the rest.
SOURCE: Litigation review
Category 2 of 5
Fee Practices & Contract Terms9 / 25
The contract, from the company’s own published agreement
Clearent’s merchant agreement, publicly posted on its own site, is worth reading before any signature. It provides for an annual compliance fee beginning in the fourth month of each account, late charges of one and a half percent per month compounded monthly on unpaid amounts, and broad indemnification obligations under which the merchant holds the bank, Clearent, and the card brands harmless, including paying their attorney’s fees, in third-party actions. Independent review documents the standard structure as a three-year term with automatic renewal and an annual regulatory fee of $49.95 to $49.99.
SOURCES: Clearent Merchant Agreement (company’s own PDF) · Contract terms review
Fee creep, documented in the transition era
Merchant records document monthly costs climbing from roughly $70 to $165 on one account with fees the merchant could not identify, unrequested features added to accounts and billed despite removal requests, PCI non-compliance fees landing on accounts open only weeks, and multiple reviewers tying cost increases to the Xplor transition, with one stating plainly that costs rose and unrequested features appeared when Clearent became Xplor Pay.
SOURCES: BBB complaint records · Capterra verified reviews · Trustpilot records with company responses
Category 3 of 5
Complaints & Resolution8 / 20
Normalized for 66,000 merchants, Clearent’s raw complaint volume is moderate, and the company actively responds on the BBB, Trustpilot, and Capterra, sometimes with specific account detail. Both facts earn points. What costs points is the concentration of the complaints in one place: the exit. The documented themes are cancellation obstruction, post-closure billing, surprise exit fees, unreachable departed reps whom merchants are told to contact anyway, and funds held with what merchants describe as poor communication. When a company’s complaint file clusters this tightly around leaving, the pattern tells you more than the volume does.
SOURCES: BBB complaint records · Trustpilot records · Merchant complaint records
Ownership & Identity
Three names in four years
Year
Event
2017
Acquires Payment Alliance International’s merchant services division, a primarily high-risk portfolio centered on firearm merchant accounts
2018
Private equity firm Advent International acquires Clearent, merges it with software vendor FieldEdge
2021
Merged with Transaction Services Group to form Xplor Technologies
2022+
Brand migrates: Clearent, then Clearent by Xplor, then Xplor Pay
Why this matters to a merchant: the entity charging your bank account can carry a different name than the one on your contract, the rep who sold you is documented in complaint records as gone while still earning residuals on your account, and the terms you agreed to under one brand follow you through each rename. When the name on the statement keeps changing, the paper trail is your only constant. Keep every version of it.
SOURCES: Acquisition history · Departed-rep residual account (BBB)
Category 4 of 5
Corporate Transparency9 / 15
A split verdict. On the statement, credit is due: independent auditors who review Clearent statements professionally describe full interchange category breakdowns on interchange-plus accounts, the opposite of the coded-interchange opacity we have documented elsewhere in this series. On the company, less so: no published rate card, private equity ownership with limited public disclosure compared to the exchange-listed processors we rate, and a brand identity that has changed three times under one owner, which independent reviewers note makes the company’s record harder for merchants to track. One more item, offered with a nod: the company’s own blog urges merchants to file claims in the Visa and Mastercard interchange settlement. A processor telling its merchants to collect from the networks is a rare sight, and we report it as we found it.
SOURCES: Statement transparency analysis · Xplor Pay settlement guidance to merchants · Ownership disclosure review
Category 5 of 5
Sales Channel Conduct5 / 15
The agreement that never arrives
The documented pattern in Clearent’s sales channel is not aggressive misquoting; it is paperwork that materializes only at exit. Multiple documented accounts describe merchants who state they never received the merchant agreement at signup, learned of the 36-month term and $395 fee only when cancelling, and were told the departed rep should have sent it.
SOURCES: BBB complaint records · Documented merchant accounts
The locked door
Understand how this company grows, because it is the deepest deduction on this page. Xplor’s own marketing pitches embedded payments to software companies: build Clearent’s processing into the ERP, the scheduling platform, the field service system, and every business that adopts the software becomes a processing customer by default. The documented record shows what that looks like from the merchant’s side: one reviewer describes being forced into Clearent because it was built into a scheduling app, and another describes being switched into the processing when their software changed hands, then billed $400 to get out.
Here is the structural problem, and it is our professional opinion stated plainly: a processor acquired through your software is a processor you cannot practically fire. Leaving the processor means replacing the operating system of your business, a switching cost so punishing that most merchants will absorb almost any fee before paying it. A company whose customers arrive through partnerships rather than persuasion, and stay because the door is locked rather than because the price is fair, does not face the competitive pressure that disciplines pricing everywhere else in the economy. When the processor is a default rather than a decision, the burden of disclosure gets heavier, not lighter, and the documented record above shows the opposite happening.
SOURCES: Xplor Pay’s own SaaS and embedded payments positioning · Embedded-payments merchant account · Switched-account records
From our own audit files
weAudit reviews merchant statements professionally, including accounts processing on Clearent rails through embedded software relationships. In our experience, and in our professional opinion, the pricing we find on these captive accounts consistently runs above what a merchant in a competitive bidding position would ever accept, precisely because these merchants were never in a competitive bidding position. The documented fee creep in the public record, one account climbing from roughly $70 to $165 per month in charges the merchant could not identify, matches the pattern our audits find where the exit is blocked. Captive customers do not get competitive prices. They get what the lock allows.
SOURCE: weAudit statement audit library, anonymized findings; fee creep documentation at BBB complaint records
The Bottom Line
If you process with Clearent or Xplor Pay today
Is Clearent a good processor? Based on the documented record, Clearent scored 56 out of 100 under the published weAudit Rating Methodology, a band reserved for companies whose documented record warrants extreme caution: a clean legal record undone by documented fee conduct, termination fees billed on agreements merchants say they never signed, post-closure billing, and distribution through captive software channels. The platform is capable; the documented conduct is what the score measures.
A 56 lands in a band our methodology reserves for companies whose documented record warrants extreme caution, and here the caution has two addresses: the exit, and the software that quietly decides your processor for you. The processing itself draws real praise, the statements are readable, and the legal file is clean. Then the account ends, and the documented record turns. Three things to do this week:
1
Obtain your signed merchant agreement now, not at exitRequest the complete signed agreement and fee schedule in writing today, while the account is healthy. The documented disputes turn on paper that surfaces only when the $395 fee does. If they cannot produce a signed copy, get that in writing too.
2
Know your renewal date and your account countThe contract is 36 months with automatic renewal, and the double-billed exit fee case turned on a second merchant account the business forgot existed. List every merchant ID under your name before you cancel anything, and cancel each one in writing.
3
Watch your bank account after closure, for monthsThe documented worst case ran two years and nearly $3,000 past cancellation. Set a recurring reminder to check drafts against your closure confirmation, and dispute the first stray charge, not the twentieth.
4
If Clearent came bundled with your software, audit it first, not lastBefore adopting any ERP, scheduling, or field service platform with payments built in, demand the processing agreement and fee schedule as part of the software evaluation, and get the right to choose your own processor in writing. If you are already inside the lock, an audit is the one form of leverage that does not require leaving.
Readable statements are a start. Verified statements are the standard.
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Right of response: Clearent, Xplor Pay, and Xplor Technologies are invited to respond to any item in this profile. Responses received will be published unedited. Contact: [email protected]
How this rating works: This profile reports documented information from court records, the Better Business Bureau, the company’s own published agreements, and independent published analysis, with sources linked throughout. Scores are calculated under weAudit’s published Rating Methodology, applied consistently to every company we rate. Complaint data is reported as complaint data and reflects the accounts of the merchants who filed it; company responses are noted where present in the record.
Independence: weAudit accepts no compensation, referral fees, or advertising from any payment processor. Our only clients are merchants.
Corrections: Documented errors are corrected within 48 hours of verification. Last updated July 2026.