Fullsteam
A payments company that does not sell payments. It buys the software you already run, then converts you. Five documented rate increases in three years, a merchant statement that never shows you the markup, and a contract in which your only remedy is to leave.
The Verdict
Nobody chooses Fullsteam. They choose Storage Commander, or Commerce7, or Maestro, and Fullsteam arrives with the wire transfer.
Fullsteam is not an ISO and does not behave like one. There is no agent knocking on your door, no leased terminal, no four year contract signed on a clipboard. There is a software company you have used and liked for years, which one morning has a new owner, and some months later a new payments product with a friendly name.
This is a cleaner business model than the ISO channel in one important respect. It removes the commissioned stranger who misrepresents rates to close a deal. But it replaces that stranger with something structurally harder to escape: a processor that also owns your point of sale, your practice management system, or your property management system, and therefore has no counterparty to negotiate against on your behalf.
Our score is driven by three findings. First, the pricing escalator: five rate increases documented between May 2023 and April 2026, compounding on a base that was never published. Second, the statement itself. Independent auditors who review Fullsteam statements professionally report that the markup Fullsteam charges does not appear anywhere on the monthly statement, and that card brand fees post on a two month lag, so a merchant needs three consecutive statements to calculate what a single month actually cost.
A merchant who cannot read their own rate off their own statement cannot detect a rate increase, cannot benchmark, and cannot negotiate. That is not a reporting deficiency. That is the pricing model.
The third finding is the contract, and it is the one we did not expect to be able to document. A copy of the Fullsteam sub merchant agreement is on the public record because a Colorado county filed it in a board packet. It reads exactly as the first two findings predict. Fees may be changed on thirty days notice, and posting the notice on a website counts as giving it. The merchant’s sole and exclusive remedy for any claim against Fullsteam, its processor, or its bank is to terminate the agreement. And the bank is never named.
Who this rating is for
If you are shopping for a processor, you will never encounter Fullsteam in a bake off, because Fullsteam does not compete in one. This rating is for the merchant who already runs a Fullsteam owned platform and has been asked, invited, or required to move payments in house. Read the escalator section before you sign.
The Ledger
Scorecard
Five categories, one hundred points. Regulatory and Legal 25, Fee Practices 25, Complaints and Resolution 20, Transparency 15, Sales Channel 15.
Regulatory and Legal
14 / 25Still the strongest category. We found no enforcement actions, no state attorney general matters, and no merchant class action naming Fullsteam, and the company operates a genuine Canadian Code of Conduct complaints process with defined service levels. The deduction is for the terms of the sub merchant agreement itself, now readable on the public record. The merchant’s sole and exclusive remedy for any claim is termination. Any alleged breach not raised in writing within thirty days is waived. Claims expire after one year. The Member Bank is a party to the contract but is never identified and may be swapped without notice.
Fee Practices
5 / 25Five increases in three years, plus a fee charged for receiving your own gross deposits, plus a PCI non compliance charge levied alongside a PCI management charge. Independent audit data puts the observed markup range between roughly 10 and 105 basis points over interchange, a tenfold spread across merchants buying the same service. The filed agreement shows the escalator is not an exception but a permission: Fullsteam may change fees on thirty days notice, notice may be given by posting on a website, and continued processing is deemed consent. Partial credit because interchange plus is genuinely available and representatives do negotiate.
Complaints and Resolution
6 / 20The complaint record is thin in volume but unusually consistent in theme. Independent merchants writing months apart describe the same dispute experience: paperwork is forwarded, nothing is advocated, and the case is lost. Volume is low partly because the complaint surface is fragmented across dozens of brand names, so there is no single place where Fullsteam grievances accumulate. Fullsteam does publish a real complaints process with acknowledgement and resolution deadlines and named external escalation routes, but only for Canada, where a regulator requires it. Credit is awarded for that process and withheld for its jurisdictional limit.
Transparency
3 / 15The lowest transparency score we have issued. The markup does not appear on the statement. Card brand fees lag by two months. Rate increase notices are not consistently attached to statements. No pricing is published on any Fullsteam property. The acquirer and the sponsor bank are named in exactly one place on the entire corporate site, on the Canadian complaints page, and nowhere in the United States disclosure. The three points awarded reflect that page and a public help centre that explains statement structure in general terms.
Sales Channel
6 / 15Credit where due: there is no independent agent army and no commission driven misrepresentation at the point of sale. The deduction is for what replaces it. The merchant chose software, and the processor arrived with the change of ownership. The agreement permits Fullsteam to assign the contract at its sole discretion, at which point a different processor and a different bank may become parties to it, while the merchant may not assign without consent. Hardware leases renew annually and terminate only by paying the balance of the term.
Total
34 / 100Finding One
The escalator
Fullsteam has raised processing rates five times since May 2023. Each increase is small enough to ignore. That is the design. Here is what they add up to.
A merchant running one million dollars a year at a seventy five dollar average ticket has absorbed roughly $10,400 in annual cost from these five notices alone, before the funding fee, before PCI charges, and on top of whatever the original markup was.
weAudit calculation. 13,333 transactions at 0.542% plus $0.38.Three structural points make this escalator different from ordinary annual repricing, which almost every processor does.
The increases are not applied uniformly. The April 2026 notice split the merchant base into at least two tracks with different terms. A merchant cannot assume that what a peer received is what they received.
Notice is inconsistent. Independent auditors report that Fullsteam does not always attach rate increase notices to statements, so some merchants learn of an increase only by email, and only if the email reaches the right person at the business.
The increase is unverifiable after the fact. This is the part that matters. Because the markup is not printed on the statement, a merchant who misses the email cannot compare March to April and detect the change. The notice is the only record, and the notice is the only thing that can be missed.
Finding Two
The statement does not contain the price
Merchant Cost Consulting, a firm that audits processor statements professionally and has reviewed Fullsteam accounts for years, reports that Fullsteam may be the only processor whose statements do not display the markup at all.
The markup is absent
Auditors report checking the daily summary, the summary by payment method, and the deposit summary. The rate the merchant pays Fullsteam is on none of them. It is not disclosed elsewhere on the document either.
Fees post two months late
Card brand fees appearing on an October statement are August fees. To calculate the true cost of a single month of processing, a merchant needs three consecutive statements and the willingness to reconcile them by hand.
The summary is not a summary
The fee recap at the top of the statement is a recap of day by day transaction activity, not a total for the period. A merchant reading it as a monthly total will understate what they paid.
Quotes are equally opaque
Auditors describe the comparison quotes Fullsteam sends to prospective and questioning merchants as difficult to parse even for trained reviewers, which removes the last practical route to a like for like price check.
Our position, offered as professional opinion rather than statement of fact: a statement that omits the markup is not an accident of legacy software. Statement design is a product decision, and every other major processor manages to print a rate. The effect of the omission is that a merchant cannot audit the account without hiring someone, cannot detect an increase without preserving an email, and cannot benchmark without disclosing their volumes to a competitor.
We note, in fairness, that the same auditors describe Fullsteam’s average observed markup as roughly forty basis points over interchange, which is unremarkable for an integrated solution. The problem is not that the price is extreme. It is that the merchant is not permitted to know it.
Finding Three
The brand curtain
Regular readers know the Descriptor Graveyard: the trail of billing descriptors left behind when merchant agreements change hands. Fullsteam runs the same mechanism one layer up. The brands are the curtain, and the processor is the same behind all of them.
Note the payment product names in that grid. MezzoPay, SC Pay, Merchant Track, RB Smart Pay. Each is presented to its vertical as that vertical’s own embedded solution. MezzoPay was launched to hoteliers with the pitch that it removes third party payment gateways and the fees attached to them. It is the same Fullsteam platform that raised rates in April 2024, April 2025 and April 2026.
The commercial logic of naming is straightforward and not in itself improper. The consequence for merchants is. Because the payments product is branded per vertical, a self storage operator comparing notes with a wine club manager has no idea they are on the same rails, subject to the same notices, and, potentially, quoted markups that differ by a factor of ten.
The same fragmentation shows up in the public complaint record. There is no consolidated Fullsteam file to search. There are Better Business Bureau profiles filed under brand names, some listing Fullsteam Operations LLC or Fullsteam Software Holdings LLC only as an alternate name in the fine print. A merchant doing due diligence on Fullsteam will find almost nothing, because the record is filed under twenty other doors.
Finding Four
Conversion is a department, not an outcome
This publication has argued at length that merchant agreements, not merchant relationships, are the traded asset in payments M and A. Fullsteam is the cleanest expression of that thesis we have documented, because Fullsteam does not buy merchant portfolios at all. It buys the software vendors that merchants have already chosen, and inherits the relationship as a by product.
The model is visible in the corporate record without needing to be inferred. Fullsteam self reported seventy acquisitions by May 2023, when Aquiline and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority recapitalised it, and deal filings show acquisitions continuing into at least February 2026. Acquired companies keep trading under their own names. The payments platform is what gets swapped in underneath.
The agreement makes the merchant’s position in that machinery explicit. Fullsteam may assign the contract at its sole discretion. The merchant may not assign without consent. On assignment, a different processor and a different member bank may become parties to the agreement, and the merchant may be required to sign a direct processing agreement with a processor of the buyer’s choosing. Separately, any merchant crossing one million dollars in annual Visa or Mastercard volume must be moved onto a direct agreement with the processor. The merchant is the subject of these clauses in every case, and the counterparty in none of them.
The merchant performed a software evaluation. Fullsteam performed an acquisition. Only one of those two parties was choosing a payment processor.
weAudit editorial positionOnce conversion is complete, the financial relationship deepens further. Fullsteam Capital, run in partnership with the embedded lender Parafin, passed $125 million in merchant financing in October 2025, extended to salons, party rental operators, limousine companies and breweries inside the portfolio. The companies reported that seventy percent of merchants who took capital came back for more.
That figure is presented as a satisfaction metric. It can also be read as a duration metric. A merchant with an outstanding advance repaid from card settlement is a merchant who is not switching processors this quarter. We make no allegation about intent. We note only that the software, the processing, the statement, and now the working capital all sit with the same counterparty, and that the merchant’s practical ability to leave declines with each addition.
Finding Five
The chargeback record
The complaint volume is low. The consistency is not. Across independent submissions months apart, merchants describe the same experience in nearly the same terms.
A Connecticut dumpster rental operator running approximately one million dollars a year through a Fullsteam owned platform reported losing close to eight thousand dollars to fraud in a single year, and described asking repeatedly and in writing for controls that were not available: no pre authorisation risk scoring, no liability shift option, and no chargeback protection product under which the provider absorbs qualifying fraud losses. What was offered instead was a document upload portal, with the caveat that submitting documentation does not guarantee an outcome. A thirty page representment built to the Compelling Evidence 3.0 standard was submitted and lost. On a separate case the issuer’s reason code was reportedly never disclosed to the merchant at all.
The escalation economics compound the problem. Card network arbitration carries fees in excess of a thousand dollars, payable in addition to the disputed amount if the merchant loses. For a business whose average ticket sits well below that threshold, arbitration is never rational. The merchant absorbs the loss regardless of the strength of the evidence.
An optometry practice on a Fullsteam owned electronic health record platform reported a comparable pattern: paperwork forwarded, no advocacy, and a run of consecutive losses beginning after migration in 2023, following twenty five years in business without losing a single dispute. A third merchant, writing separately in July 2026, described the same behaviour in two sentences.
We do not treat a handful of reviews as proof of systemic failure, and we note that Fullsteam serves a merchant base reported in the tens of thousands. What raises this above anecdote is the specificity and the convergence. Three unrelated merchants in three unrelated verticals independently identify the same missing capability set, and none of the missing capabilities are exotic. Pre authorisation screening and liability shift are standard offerings at processors serving far smaller merchants.
There is also an ownership dimension the first merchant identified correctly. When a processor and the software platform are the same company, building fraud screening is not a vendor negotiation. It is an internal roadmap decision. Fullsteam has reportedly indicated it is evaluating a third party dispute service, which addresses representment after a chargeback lands rather than prevention before authorisation.
Finding Six
The paper
Fullsteam publishes no merchant terms of service. We obtained the sub merchant agreement anyway, because a Colorado county signed one and filed it in a public board packet. It is the most useful document on this page.
The document is the Fullsteam Operations LLC Sub Merchant Payment Processing Agreement, revision dated 7 November 2021, executed with Routt County, Colorado and published through the county agenda system. Two caveats belong here before anything else. A government counterparty negotiates, so some terms in this copy, including the governing law clause and a reserve provision expressed as requiring mutual agreement, may be more favourable than the form a small business receives. And a 2021 revision may since have been amended, which the agreement itself permits without a signature. Read what follows as the structure of the bargain rather than as your exact contract.
With those caveats stated, the structure is remarkable, and it explains almost everything else on this page.
The escalator is pre authorised
Fullsteam may amend the agreement or change the fees, without prior notice, provided it gives thirty calendar days notice of the change. Notice may be given by email or by posting on a website, and posting is deemed adequate. Continuing to process is taken as consent. The five increases are not exceptions to the contract. They are the contract working.
Your only remedy is to leave
The merchant’s sole and exclusive remedy for any and all claims against Fullsteam, its processor, or its member bank, arising out of or in any way related to the agreement or the services, is termination of the agreement. Not damages. Not a refund. Exit.
Thirty days to object, one year to sue
Any alleged breach by Fullsteam, its processor, or its bank must be raised in detailed writing within thirty days of the date it first occurred. Failure to do so is deemed acceptance and a waiver of all rights pertaining to that breach. Separately, no action may be brought more than one year after the cause arose, except an action for money owed to Fullsteam.
The bank is a party and is never named
The Member Bank is expressly made a party to the agreement and may enforce its terms against the merchant. It is defined only as a member of the card networks that provides sponsorship. It is identified nowhere in the document, and it may be changed and its obligations assigned to another party at any time without notice to anyone, including Fullsteam.
Automatic renewal on a ninety day window
The initial term runs one year from the first transaction and renews automatically for further one year periods unless written notice is given at least ninety days before expiry. Hardware leases run on the same evergreen pattern, and terminating early makes the remainder of the lease term immediately due.
Reserves are commingled and yours are not yours
Reserve funds may be held in a commingled account with other sub merchants’ reserves, without an independent escrow agent, and the merchant agrees it has no right, title or interest in that account. On termination a reserve may be established and held for six months, or longer at Fullsteam’s sole discretion.
Offered as professional opinion. Individually, most of these clauses appear in merchant agreements across the industry, and we have criticised them elsewhere. What makes this document notable is how precisely the clauses interlock with the two findings above it.
The price is not printed on the statement. Notice of a price change may be given by posting it on a website. Continued processing is consent. An objection must be made within thirty days of the breach. And the only remedy available at the end of that road is the right to cancel. Each clause is defensible on its own. Together they describe a pricing relationship in which the merchant is not reliably informed of the price, is deemed to have agreed to it, and has no recourse other than departure, which the automatic renewal window permits on ninety days notice once a year.
A contract in which the sole remedy is termination is not a contract about performance. It is a contract about retention.
weAudit editorial positionFinding Seven
Everything a merchant needs to know is published, in Canada
Fullsteam runs one page that does everything this rating asks a processor to do. It names the acquirer. It names the sponsor bank. It sets deadlines for answering complaints and it lists the regulators a merchant can escalate to. It applies only to Canada.
The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada maintains a Code of Conduct for the credit and debit card industry. Participation obliges acquirers and their partners to operate a documented complaints process, to disclose fees plainly, to give notice of fee increases, and to allow merchants to cancel without penalty in defined circumstances. Fullsteam complies. Its Canadian Code of Conduct complaint page, revised 21 January 2026, commits to acknowledging complaints within five business days and addressing them within twenty, with an explanation if that deadline slips, and to giving either an offer of resolution or a denial with reasons.
That page is also the only place on the Fullsteam corporate site where the payments chain is disclosed. A dissatisfied Canadian merchant is told to escalate to Worldpay, then to Peoples Trust Company, then to Visa Canada, Mastercard Canada, American Express Canada, or the FCAC directly, with addresses and phone numbers for each. The complaint form even asks which element of the Code is at issue, offering transparency and disclosure, notice of fee increase, contract cancellation, and renewal and cancellation disclosure among the options.
Worldpay is Fullsteam’s acquirer. Peoples Trust is the Canadian sponsor bank. Neither name appears anywhere in the United States facing disclosure, and neither appears in the sub merchant agreement examined above, which refers to the Processor and the Member Bank as unnamed roles. Worldpay itself changed hands on 9 January 2026, when Global Payments completed its acquisition from FIS and GTCR. A Fullsteam merchant’s acquiring relationship moved to a different public company, and the fact is discoverable only by reading a Canadian compliance page and then following the corporate news.
We want to be fair about what this shows. Fullsteam is not doing anything improper by complying with Canadian rules, and the page is a competent piece of compliance. The United States has no federal equivalent of the Code, so there is no legal obligation to publish the same thing for American merchants.
That is precisely the point, and it is the reason we have given this finding its own section. The company demonstrably knows how to name its acquirer, name its bank, publish a complaints process with deadlines, and tell a merchant where to escalate when it will not resolve a dispute. It does all of that where a regulator requires it, and none of it where one does not. The disclosure is not a capability question. It is a jurisdiction question, and American merchants are on the wrong side of it.
Reference
The fee stack
None of this is published by Fullsteam. Every line below comes from independent audits of live merchant statements. Amounts vary by account, vertical, and negotiation.
| Line item | What it is | Observed |
|---|---|---|
| Processing markup | The spread over interchange. Not printed on the statement. | 0.10% to 1.05% |
| Daily Gross Funding Fee | Charged to receive gross daily deposits. Avoidable only by moving to net funding. | 0.05% to 0.07% |
| PCI Non Compliance Fee | Monthly penalty for failing to validate compliance. | $34.95 to $69.95 / mo |
| PCI Breach Protection Fee | Charged alongside the above, for compliance management and breach cover. | $14.95 to $19.95 / mo |
| Accelerated Funding Fee | Next business day deposits. | $20 / mo |
| Account Updater Fee | Per refreshed card credential on file. | $1 per update |
| Partner of Processing Cost Fee | Applied to certain account types, introduced October 2023. | 0.02% + $0.02 |
| Monthly Service Fee | Variable. Auditors advise merchants to request removal. | Varies, sometimes $0 |
Two lines deserve particular attention. The Daily Gross Funding Fee is a charge for receiving your settlement in gross rather than net. It was introduced in April 2025 and increased in April 2026. The merchant is being billed a percentage of volume for the timing and form of their own money.
The PCI pairing is the more familiar industry pattern and no less objectionable for it. A merchant can be charged a monthly management fee for a compliance service and, simultaneously, a monthly penalty for not being compliant. At the top of both ranges that is roughly $1,080 a year, on a service the processor is arguably obliged to provide.
Practical
If you are on a Fullsteam platform
Eight steps, in order. The first four cost nothing and take an afternoon.
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Pull three consecutive statements, not one
Because card brand fees post on a two month lag, a single statement cannot tell you what a month cost. Take three, and reconcile the fee block on the third against the volume on the first.
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Calculate the markup yourself, since it is not printed
Total everything Fullsteam retained, subtract published interchange and network assessments for your card mix, and divide by volume. The result is your effective markup. Compare it against the 10 to 105 basis point range above and decide where you sit.
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Search your email for every rate notice since 2023
Search on the terms rate increase, pricing update, and effective April. You are looking for five notices. If you find fewer than five, you have either been on a different track or you have missed one, and either answer is worth knowing.
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Download your own sub merchant agreement and find four clauses
Fullsteam’s own help documentation says a copy is available in the application portal. Find the amendment clause, the sole remedy clause, the notice of breach clause, and the renewal clause. Then diarise the date ninety days before your renewal, because that is the only window in which leaving is a decision rather than a penalty.
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Ask three questions about disputes and get the answers in writing
Do you offer pre authorisation fraud screening. Do you offer chargeback protection with liability transfer. What are the arbitration fees relative to my average ticket. A merchant who has already lived this recommended exactly these three, and they are the right three.
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Separate the software question from the payments question
Liking your platform is not a reason to accept its processing. Ask your account manager, in writing, whether your software licence remains in force if you decline or exit the embedded payments product, and at what price. The answer to that question defines your actual leverage.
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Treat embedded capital as a switching decision
An outstanding advance repaid from card settlement ties your processing to your financing. That may still be the right trade for your business. Make it deliberately, not because it appeared in the dashboard on a slow week.
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If you are in Canada, use the escalation route you already have
Canadian merchants have a published complaints process with a five day acknowledgement, a twenty business day answer, and named escalation to Worldpay, Peoples Trust Company, the card networks, and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada. It exists because the Code of Conduct requires it. Use it. American merchants should ask, in writing, what the equivalent process is, and keep the answer.
Methodology
How this rating was built
Ratings are scored across five weighted categories totalling one hundred points: Regulatory and Legal, 25 points. Fee Practices, 25 points. Complaints and Resolution, 20 points. Transparency, 15 points. Sales Channel, 15 points. Scores below 60 are marked red, 60 to 69 amber, 70 to 79 neutral, 80 and above mint. Dossiers and special reports carry gold marks and are not scored.
Fullsteam scores 34, tied with CardConnect for the lowest rating issued in this series to date. The driver is not that Fullsteam charges the highest prices we have examined, because on the available evidence it does not. The driver is that Fullsteam is the only rated entity whose merchants cannot determine their own price from their own statement, combined with a contract that pre authorises price changes and limits the merchant’s remedy to walking away. Every other finding on this page compounds from those two.
This rating relies on public corporate disclosures, a sub merchant agreement filed on a county public record, the Fullsteam Canadian Code of Conduct complaint page, press releases and deal filings, trade press, published merchant reviews, and the published audit work of independent statement auditors. We have not reviewed a Fullsteam merchant statement in our own possession for this rating. Where a finding rests on third party audit work, we have said so in the text.
Two limits on the contract analysis are stated in that section and repeated here. The agreement we examined is a 2021 revision executed with a government counterparty that had the standing to negotiate, and the agreement permits amendment without signature, so an individual merchant’s terms may differ. We describe it as the structure of the bargain, not as any particular merchant’s contract.
Nothing on this page is a claim of unlawful conduct. We found no enforcement actions and no merchant class action naming Fullsteam, and that absence is reflected in the highest of the five category scores.