High-Risk Merchant Accounts for iGaming in 2026

Nuvei is a Montreal card acquirer and PSP cleared for gaming payments in 20 US states, and its instant player withdrawals have run with Hard Rock since May 2022. In November 2024 Advent International took the company private at US$34 a share and financial disclosure stopped at Q3 2024, with the last public year closing at a US$696M impairment-driven net loss and a US$2.75B Payoneer acquisition due to close mid-2027.

An operator buys principal card acquiring across 174 countries and 138 processing currencies, gaming registrations in Pennsylvania and Colorado, payout rails from RTP and Visa Direct to Aeropay's 24/7 pay-by-bank, and a gaming unit whose clients include bet365, DraftKings, Entain, Evoke, FanDuel, and Flutter. Global Payments closed its $24.25B purchase on January 9, 2026 and is folding Worldpay into one company, so a contract signed now is with a business mid-integration and in its fourth ownership structure in eight years. Gaming pricing is negotiated per deal.

Paysafe owns its card gateway, the Skrill and Neteller wallets, the paysafecard and Paysafecash eCash network, and US Pay by Bank, all behind one API, with a client list that includes DraftKings since 2013 and Caesars since 2012. One high-risk merchant's chargebacks forced a Q3 2025 provision and guidance cut that dropped the stock 27.6% in a day, on top of a $182.5M FY2025 net loss and $2.4B of net debt.

Trust Payments grew out of Secure Trading, which was acquiring for internet merchants in Bangor in 1997, and it has run Malta-based card acquiring since 2012. It is now a mid-size, PE-owned group where gaming is one vertical among several, the methods list runs to roughly 27 names, and pricing is quoted per deal. ProbH, its ML score for a customer's probability of gambling harm, has no counterpart among card acquirers. For a UK or EU licensed operator that wants one regulated acquirer with sub-30-minute card payouts and a responsible-gambling data layer, it is a credible shortlist name rather than a market leader.

The trade emerchantpay offers is specialist attention in place of scale: a dedicated Risk Analyst, in-house UK and EU acquiring, and card payouts over Visa OCT in a regulated market, against a 50-method catalog where Nuvei or Paysafe bring hundreds of methods and US state approvals. FY2025 closed with $183.9m revenue, $11.28bn processed, and the group's first-ever quarter averaging over $1bn a month. Pinnacle in Ontario is the one public gambling deployment, other operator work sits under NDA, and commercials stop at the IC++ headline.

PXP acquires on its own FCA authorization in the UK and works as a gateway in the US, where BetMGM has run across seven states since January 2021. Entain and Tipico are gaming clients as well, and the same contract covers retail POS, SoftPOS, and cash acceptance at the casino cage. The US model leaves acquiring with US partners, and EEA merchants are served on an Austrian partner's license.