High-risk payment solutions: How to find the best platform for your business

If you operate in a high-risk industry, you’ll know that managing payments comes with constant challenges. 

You might be dealing with:

• Payment providers cutting you off with little notice, leaving you scrambling for alternatives.
• High chargeback rates and fraud eating into your margins, even when disputes aren’t justified.
• Trying to integrate with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) for redundancy and efficiency, but the complex integrations are draining your resources and taking too long.
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These issues don’t just create operational headaches; they can disrupt revenue, damage customer experience, and put business growth at risk. But with the right payment setup, you can stay in control.

This article will break down the biggest payment challenges for businesses operating in high-risk industries, what to look for in a payment solution, and how Primer helps businesses build a payment stack that’s resilient, flexible, and built for long-term success.

Primer is a payment infrastructure platform that gives businesses complete control over their payments. Book a call today to see how Primer can help your business. 

What are the key challenges merchants in high-risk industries face? 

Firstly, it’s worth mentioning that not all high-risk businesses face the same level of fraud or chargebacks, yet many are grouped together under the same label.

Due to high fraud rates and chargebacks, cryptocurrency exchanges, online gaming platforms, and trading firms have very real risk management concerns. Similarly, travel and ticketing businesses are high-risk sectors because of long fulfillment times and refund disputes.

However, in some industries, the ‘high-risk’ label is more about perception than actual fraud rates.
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Take Patreon—a platform primarily used by creators to offer memberships and exclusive content. While the vast majority of transactions are legitimate, PSPs and banks often classify it as high-risk due to the potential for adult content or brand reputation concerns.

For instance, in 2018, PayPal froze the accounts of several adult content creators on Patreon, leading the platform to seek alternative payment processors.

Ecommerce businesses selling CBD products face similar challenges, struggling to secure payment processing despite operating within regulations.

Whether a business is high-risk due to fraud patterns or industry-wide perceptions, the following four payment challenges remain the same:

1. PSPs can cut you off with little warning

Whether you operate in crypto, iGaming, travel, nutraceuticals, ticketing, or another regulated industry, getting approved for and maintaining a high-risk merchant account can be a major hurdle. 

Even if you pass the application process, many PSPs impose strict limitations on the merchant services they offer, along with other penalties. For example, rolling reserves—a security measure where the PSP holds back a percentage of revenue—can tie up cash flow, making it harder to scale or cover operational costs.

Payment providers frequently revise their risk appetite; when that happens, entire industries can suddenly lose access to payment processing. 

This isn’t just a theoretical risk. For example, major PSPs might decide to stop serving crypto exchanges due to concerns about fraud or regulation. If a large crypto platform is processing millions in transactions through a single PSP, a sudden cutoff could mean an immediate and catastrophic loss of revenue.

If these crypto exchanges aren't integrated with a backup processor, they could easily find themselves scrambling to find one to maintain the ability to accept payments.

2. Chargebacks and fraud drive up costs

Chargebacks are a major concern for high-risk businesses. Online gaming platforms often deal with “friendly fraud,” where players dispute transactions after losing a bet.

Travel merchants face similar issues—if a customer books a flight months in advance and later changes their mind, they might issue a chargeback instead of requesting a refund.

Even if merchants win chargeback disputes, they still face non-refundable processing fees and operational costs. Worse, if chargeback ratios exceed set thresholds, their PSP may shut down their account.

3. Integrating multiple PSPs is time-consuming and costly

For all merchants, relying on a single PSP is a risk. The solution is to work with multiple providers to ensure redundancy. However, onboarding and integrating each one can be a slow, resource-intensive process.

Contract signing with a new PSP can take months due to compliance checks, underwriting, and regulatory reviews. Even after approval, businesses face the technical challenge of integrating the new PSP into their payment stack. 

Read more: Why you need a multi-processor payment strategy

4. Regulatory and scheme requirements are constantly changing

Many high-risk industries must navigate additional compliance requirements set by regulators and card networks.

In Australia, sports betting merchants can no longer accept credit card payments, requiring businesses to ensure their payment flows automatically block these transactions. Likewise, Visa and Mastercard have introduced new data requirements for crypto and gambling merchants, requiring them to send additional payment details to card issuers.

Keeping up with constantly evolving regulations adds another layer of complexity—especially for businesses operating across multiple regions, where compliance rules vary. Without a flexible payment infrastructure that you can easily modify, businesses risk payment disruptions or increased friction at checkout.

Are you an iGaming merchant? Find the best solution for you: iGaming payment solutions: How to integrate and manage multiple PSPs

Five features to look for in a high-risk payment solution

Payment Leaders at working at high-risk businesses have more to consider than most when building their payment stack.

High-risk merchants  need a flexible, resilient payment platform with payment orchestration capabilities—one that supports multiple PSPs, automates transaction routing, and reduces reliance on any single provider.

Here are five features to look out for: 

1. Fast and simple PSP onboarding

Onboarding with a new PSP can take anywhere from three to 18 months, bogged down by compliance checks, underwriting, and integrations. 

Contracting is contracting—there’s no way to speed up compliance checks. However, using an infrastructure layer eliminates the time needed to integrate with a new PSP since the connection is already pre-built.

Given the volatile nature of high-risk payment processing, you need a solution that gives you flexibility and the ability to switch payment services without calling upon engineering resources.

2. Load balancing and redundancy

During peak periods, PSP congestion and failures can lead to lost revenue. A strong payment solution should enable businesses to split traffic between multiple PSPs, effectively load-balancing demand and ensuring transactions continue processing smoothly.

If a payment does fail due to a recoverable issue (a soft decline), the system should automatically retry through a backup provider to avoid unnecessary loss of revenue (known as cascading payments).

Having backup processors set up is crucial for low-risk merchants, too. Read more about the importance of redundancy:  Why merchants should build a Fallback strategy 

3. Chargeback and fraud prevention

High-risk businesses face increasing scrutiny from banks, financial institutions, and card networks, making fraud prevention essential. A reliable payment solution should have flexible 3DS tools to allow you to execute an authentication strategy that meets your business’s unique risk profile.

If you already have in-house fraud detection, check that your solution provides an easy API connection to your current fraud prevention tools.

4. Scalability for future growth

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Your payment strategy should scale with your business, ensuring long-term success—whether you're optimizing authorization rates, reducing costs, or managing risk.

With customizable, automated routing, you can adapt in real-time by setting rules based on performance metrics, decline codes, and risk thresholds. This ensures every transaction follows the most efficient path, increasing success rates, minimizing fees, and maintaining security—without adding friction for customers.

A truly scalable solution grows with you. Avoid the risk of outgrowing your payment infrastructure by choosing a flexible system that evolves with your needs, so you’re always ready for what’s next.

Primer does all of the above and more. Keep reading to find out more. 

Why should high-risk merchants use Primer? 

Introducing Primer, a unified payment infrastructure that allows businesses to streamline, automate, and optimize their payment processes globally. It enables merchants to integrate multiple payment methods, manage transaction flows, and leverage fraud prevention tools—all through a single platform.

Here are a few reasons high-risk merchants should try Primer: 

1. Integrate with new PSPs in seconds (instead of months) 

You probably know you need to integrate with more payment service providers, but the engineering burden might be holding your team back.

With Primer, the technical roadblock of processor integration becomes a thing of the past.

Thanks to our unified API, you can connect directly to as many PSPs as you need from your Primer dashboard. Simply integrate with Primer once, and access popular global and local payment processors, including Adyen, Stripe, PayPal, and WorldPay. 

 Adding a new PSP is as simple as:

1. Selecting the provider from Primer’s library of integrations
2. Entering your merchant credentials
3. Instantly activating the PSP—no coding required

This means that you can:

• Quickly adapt your payment strategy if one PSP changes its risk appetite. 
• Scale faster. No more waiting for engineering resources to become available. 
• Start to route online payments to the best processor for your business priorities, whether that’s for the lowest transaction fee cost or to the most reliable payment option.

Learn more about payment routing and how Primer makes it simple: Payment routing: Everything you need to know

2. Recover up to 20% of lost revenue with Primer Fallbacks 

Failed transactions can happen for various reasons—whether it’s technical issues, application errors, or a transaction requiring authentication.

When this happens, the stakes are high: lost payments mean lost revenue and a potentially damaged reputation—especially when customers expect seamless transactions and have little patience for failed payments. Even a short disruption can stall momentum, impact customer trust, and hinder growth, particularly for businesses operating in high-risk industries where reliability is critical.

Primer’s Fallbacks feature ensures your payments don’t just stop. If a PSP declines a transaction but it’s still recoverable, Primer automatically reroutes it to your backup processor in real time. This improves authorization rates, prevents revenue loss, and ensures continuity—all without manual intervention.

Best of all, Fallbacks can be configured through Primer’s no-code Workflow builder in just a few clicks. With Primer, high-risk businesses can maintain uninterrupted cash flow, protect their bottom line, and prevent disruptions caused by provider outages or declines.

This is how Primer customer Banxa—a leading crypto on- and off-ramp provider—recovered 17% of previously failed transactions and unlocked millions in additional revenue using Primer’s Fallbacks functionality.

Read more: How Banxa recovered 17% of failed payments with Primer.

3. Proactively Monitor and optimize payment performance

Adding multiple PSPs to ensure redundancy is essential, but it often comes with its own set of problems: fragmented data and a lack of visibility.

Primer’s Observability solution solves this by centralizing all your payment data in one place.
Instead of piecing together metrics across providers, merchants gain real-time insights into key performance indicators like authorization rates, transaction failures, and chargeback trends—giving them the visibility they need to act quickly.

Another powerful tool is Monitors, where you can set up proactive alerts for critical events, such as:

• Authorization rates dropping below a set threshold.
• A PSP experiencing downtime or service degradation.
• Unusual spikes in chargebacks or fraud attempts.
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These alerts allow you to mitigate risks immediately, whether by fraud rules, contacting a PSP to resolve issues before they affect revenue, or routing transactions away from them altogether. 

These are just a few of the ways Primer can help.

You can also:

• Seamlessly integrate with fraud prevention tools—including Riskified, Forter, and Signifyd—to enhance fraud detection while keeping your existing risk models intact.
• Implement a dynamic 3DS strategy based on risk, issuer requirements, and merchant preference across all of your processors. 
• Simplify reconciliation and settlement tracking with centralized visibility over settlements, payout cycles, and discrepancies across all PSPs and payment gateways.
• Boost security and approval rates with network tokens. Replaces sensitive card details, reducing fraud risk and increasing authorization rates while minimizing payment failures.
• Rely on our expert customer support. Our team brings deep industry expertise in chargebacks, fraud prevention, compliance, and payment optimization—helping you confidently navigate the complexities of high-risk transactions.
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Interested in how Primer can help your business? Book a call with our experts to find out about our pricing and how to get started.

How Primer helped Dabble build a resilient high-risk payment infrastructure

Dabble, a rising star in Australia's competitive gambling market, needed a payment solution that could handle surging transaction volumes, optimize authorization rates, and provide the flexibility to scale.

With events like the Melbourne Cup driving massive spikes in user activity, any friction in the payment process risked pushing customers to established competitors. To stay ahead, Dabble turned to Primer’s unified payments infrastructure.

By integrating Primer, Dabble was able to:

• Ensure payment resilience with multiple PSP: When operating in a high-risk industry, relying on a single provider is a gamble. Primer enabled Dabble to connect new processors like Nuevi and Checkout.com instantly, ensuring redundancy and stability in new markets.
• Recover lost revenue through automated Fallbacks: Dabble recovered nearly $50,000 USD in just over a month by automatically retrying failed transactions with alternative processors.
• Optimize authorization rates under pressure: With a 96% authorization rate during the Melbourne Cup, Dabble ensured that even during peak traffic, transactions were processed smoothly—critical for any high-risk business operating in competitive markets.
• Rapidly add alternative payment methods: Apple Pay and Google Pay were integrated without developer resources, providing customers with seamless alternatives to credit and debit card payments—reducing chargeback risks and increasing conversion rates.
• Stay ahead of fraud and compliance challenges: Real-time monitoring and automated fraud prevention rules allowed Dabble to proactively respond to suspicious transactions, keeping them compliant and reducing unnecessary disputes.

For any high-risk business, adapting payments on the fly, minimizing disruptions, and maintaining high approval rates is critical to long-term success. 

Dabble’s experience with Primer shows how the right high-risk payment solution can turn challenges into opportunities—giving high-risk merchants the tools they need to stay in control, reduce risk, and scale without limits.

Choose Primer as your high-risk payment solutions 

Primer enables high-risk merchants to stay agile and respond to a fast-changing environment. By simplifying your payment stack, you can scale without worrying about PSPs changing their risk appetite, unexpected account terminations, or compliance roadblocks.

To get started, book a call with one of our payment experts.