IBI Merchant Services

The firm's intake form names adult, travel, telemarketing, debt collections, credit repair, e-cigarettes, and timeshares among its accepted high-risk categories. It also serves conventional retail, restaurant, and e-commerce merchants. The common thread is verticals where chargeback ratios, regulatory complexity, or reputational risk cause traditional acquirers to decline the account.

The firm maintains relationships with overseas acquiring banks to set up offshore merchant accounts. These accounts allow international processing when no domestic acquirer will board the merchant. The website describes this as a path for 'high risk and international businesses who are having difficulty placing a merchant account domestically,' offering the 'lowest rates, with the fastest deposit times and no processing limits.'

Standard processors use automated underwriting against normalized risk scores. High-risk verticals break those models — a telemarketer's chargeback pattern or an adult merchant's reputational flag will trigger automatic decline with conventional acquirers. High-risk specialists like IBI replace automatic scoring with curated acquirer relationships, spreading risk across domestic and offshore banking partners that have specific risk appetites for each category.