List of payment processors: a directory built from registers holds 667 acquirers, 98 of them in Lithuania, and the useful part is 9 cards

I suspect most lists of payment processors are written by someone selling one of them. So I went looking for a list built the other way round, from registers, and the closest thing I found is a section of Bank Index, a public directory of banks and financial companies that scores them from 0 to 10 on what a business needs. It has a page called card acquirers and processors. On 23 September this desk opened its United States drawer and found 2 names. On 24 September the whole cabinet held 667 companies in 31 countries.

I had assumed a list like that would be a map of where card money actually moves. It is not, and the way it is wrong turned out to be more useful than the list itself. This piece reads it from top to bottom and then reads 9 of the best-documented payment cards in the directory, the ones an online store is most likely to be offered.

Where the 667 are

The country split on the acquirers page looks strange at first. Lithuania has 98, the most of any country. France has 93, the Netherlands 67, Malta 49, Malaysia 44, Germany 35 and Ireland 30. The United States has only 2 on the list. The United Kingdom does not appear at all.

Nobody who runs a checkout would describe the market that way. The explanation sits on the cards themselves. The Lithuanian entity behind Airwallex, AWX Lithuania, has a card whose summary lists the services the EBA payment register records for its licence, and acquiring payment transactions is one of them, in a long row with issuing e-money, executing card payments and credit transfers.

So the list is, as far as I can tell, a list of permissions. A Vilnius e-money institution that is allowed to acquire card payments can appear next to Adyen, whether or not it has ever signed a merchant. That would explain Lithuania, which licenses a great many payment firms. It would also explain the United States, if there is no public register of acquirers there for the directory to read, and I have not found one. A permission is not a business.

I like that the directory keeps the distinction. I also think a store owner should know it before treating the page as a shortlist. It is a list of who could take your card money, and the shortlist is a much smaller thing.

The cards worth reading

The better part of the directory, for a store, is the set of payment companies with full cards: 13 scored needs each, every score sourced to the company's own pages or filings. The line that matters most is called Online businesses: e-commerce and SaaS. Here is how 9 of them score on it.

I should admit where I started. I had Stripe filed in my head as the default, the account a store opens before it has decided anything, and I expected its card to read like the benchmark. It scores 8.0, level with Mollie and Solidgate and below Airwallex and Adyen. I was wrong to treat it as the yardstick. On this line it is one of a group, and the group is closer together than the marketing suggests.

Airwallex leads the line with 9.0. Its card cites collection accounts in 20 plus currencies, acquiring at 3.30 per cent plus 50 cents and free local payouts to 120 plus countries. Adyen scores 8.5, and its reason starts with 3 words that none of the others can use: “Acquiring as a bank.” It covers online and point of sale on one integration, with local methods in more than 60 shopper markets.

Three companies score 8.0 each. Stripe Payments UK Limited is described as UK card acquiring for online merchants with published per-transaction pricing and no monthly minimum. Mollie offers card acquiring, iDEAL and other local methods, all with published rates. Solidgate, licensed in Cyprus, bundles acquiring with chargeback representment, prevention alerts and plugins for Shopify and WooCommerce.

Worldpay scores 7.5, with a card that notes its enterprise business alone processes 2.3 trillion dollars a year, and that it offers no receiving accounts. Fiserv scores 6.5 on about 6 million merchant locations and the Clover point-of-sale system. Shift4 scores 6.0, with a card that credits its Finaro purchase for cross-border e-commerce acquiring. Square scores 5.0, and its card is blunt about why: “Square's tools target in-person and omnichannel retail and restaurant sellers; there is no dedicated recurring-billing or SaaS product beyond basic invoicing.”

I think that 5.0 is fair for an online subscription business and unfair for a café that also sells coffee beans online, and the card is explicit that it is scoring the first. That is the thing about a line score. It answers one question well and says nothing about the others, which is why I would never read the overall number for a payment company on its own.

The largest payment processors are not at the top

That last paragraph surprised me. The largest payment processors by the numbers on these cards are Worldpay, Fiserv and Shift4, and none of them leads the e-commerce line. The line rewards what a growing online store can use from its first month: published prices, local methods, recurring billing, payouts, and a way to hold the money in more than one currency.

Scale shows up elsewhere, in the financial strength line. Adyen and Fiserv score 8.0 there. Adyen's reason gives net income of 925 million euros and equity of 4.232 billion euros in 2024, and calls it a licensed European bank listed on Euronext Amsterdam. Fiserv's gives 80.1 billion dollars of total assets and 21.2 billion dollars of revenue in 2025.

The fintech names sit lower on strength. Stripe's UK entity scores 5.0, because it is unrated as a standalone company and its parent's group figures are not broken out at Companies House. Airwallex scores 5.0 as an unrated private company that raised 320 million dollars at an 11 billion dollar valuation in June 2026, and Solidgate scores 4.5, privately held with no published statements but holding a Central Bank of Cyprus e-money licence since 2023, with 275 employees across Nicosia, Warsaw and Kyiv. Worldpay's UK entity scores 6.0, because it publishes no accounts of its own even though its new parent paid about 24.25 billion dollars for it.

I find it hard to read past how often the entity is the problem. That gap is the whole point. The brand on the checkout page is one company. The entity that holds your settlement and signs your contract is often a subsidiary with thinner public numbers. The cards are careful to name the entity, and that alone is worth the visit. Stripe's strength line opens with the words “Unrated as a standalone entity”, which is not a criticism of Stripe so much as a description of where the contract actually sits.

I would like every checkout provider to print that sentence on its pricing page. None of them do, as far as I can tell, and I understand why: it is not a selling point. It is, however, the first thing I would want to know if a payout stopped arriving on a Friday afternoon.

A short digression about 2 words

An aside, since the search results use them as if they were the same. A processor moves card data between the checkout, the card networks and the banks. An acquirer is the licensed party that takes on the merchant and the money, and the card schemes treat it as responsible for the merchant. Some companies are both at once. Plenty of the names on a list of acquiring banks are neither in the sense a store owner means, because they hold the permission and use it for something else. It has nothing to do with how good they are.

Back to the store. The words matter because the contract you sign names one of them, and the chargeback that goes wrong goes wrong with that one.

How I would use the section

Open the front page of Bank Index and pick the need called online businesses. The ranking recalculates for that single need.

On each card, read 3 lines: the e-commerce line, the strength line and the summary that names the legal entity. Then follow the source link on the e-commerce line, which for most of them lands on the pricing page, and check the price yourself, because prices move faster than any directory.

Take Worldpay as the example. The brand processes trillions, and the card says so. The UK entity publishes no accounts of its own, and the card says that too. If I were a UK store signing with it, I would want the contracting entity named in the agreement and I would look for its filings at Companies House, knowing in advance from the card that I would not find full accounts there. That is not a reason to walk away. It is a reason to ask one more question before signing, and to ask it in writing.

For licensing, our earlier piece on how to check if a payment processor is licensed walks through the acquiring bank and the Visa registry. For price, the payment processor comparison covers rolling reserves and switching.

The long list itself is best used in reverse. If a provider you are offered is registered in one of the 31 countries and is missing from the list, that is worth one more look at the register itself. If it is on the list, it tells you the permission exists and nothing more.

What I still cannot tell you

I cannot tell you how many of the 667 actually acquire card payments for merchants. The register records permissions, the directory copies them faithfully, and I have not found a public source anywhere that counts active merchant books by company.

I would not call the long list useless. It is a very good map of permissions, which is a thing no marketing list will ever give you, and a store in the Netherlands choosing between 67 local names has a starting point that no marketing list offers. It simply is not a ranking, and it does not claim to be.

I also cannot explain why the United Kingdom is missing from the section while its payment firms have full cards elsewhere in the directory. I suspect it is simply that the UK register the directory reads does not flag acquiring the way the EBA register does, and I would bet the gap closes when it finds a source that does. That is only a guess, nothing more.

I keep thinking about the 98 Lithuanian names. Most of them will not touch a card payment for a store like yours, and every one of them is allowed to. That is the most honest thing a list of payment processors has told me all year.