A high-risk merchant account, with the US file acquirers underwrite.

An acquirer calls a merchant high-risk when the account is likely to cost it money after the sale: chargebacks it must fund while a dispute runs, refunds on goods never shipped, network fines when dispute ratios cross the monitoring thresholds. The vertical matters, but the underwriter looks first at how the money comes in and how easily it goes back out.

Four things push a file into the high-risk queue. Card-not-present sales, where the cardholder is never in front of the merchant. Subscription and continuity billing, where a customer who forgets a trial disputes the second charge. High tickets bought from paid traffic, where one unhappy buyer is an expensive dispute. And a vertical with a dispute history of its own, such as nutra, coaching or digital products, however clean the individual store is.

For a merchant based outside the United States, a fifth factor sits on top: no US person, no US bank account and no US entity in the file, so the acquirer has nobody to call and nothing to hold. The standard requirements on US merchant account are already hard to meet from abroad; high-risk underwriting adds a second layer. For the definition and the fee mechanics, read what a high-risk merchant account is.

IBOCore is vertical-agnostic inside the high-risk space, and the plan follows the vertical. On White Hat: high-ticket dropshipping, info-products and courses, coaching and consulting, white-hat e-commerce, compliant health and wellness and SaaS. Steady volume, one-time or multi-payment billing, a flat monthly fee.

On Grey Hat: subscription and continuity, nutra and supplements, streaming and subscriptions, crypto-adjacent education and signals, paid media and publishing, fitness apps and memberships. Recurring billing, higher dispute exposure, a revenue share instead of a flat fee. Each vertical has its own page with the underwriting realities; the full map is on industries.

Six spaces are refused whatever the plan: five sit behind licences and dedicated acquirers outside the IBOCore infrastructure, the sixth on principle. Using a live package for any of them is forbidden. If your product sits near a line, for example a supplement sold with medical claims or a crypto offer that touches custody, ask on Telegram before you pay.

Each package is built to open one merchant account at a time. One entity, one director, one bank account, one application: the underwriter sees a single coherent business, not an entity already carrying three descriptors. Once the first MID is live, more MIDs can be stacked on the same entity with compatible acquirers. For parallel MIDs on different processors, the answer is another package, with its own director and its own file.

That is also how capacity is added. Acquirers cap the monthly volume on a MID; when a store reaches the cap, a second package opens a second MID instead of renegotiating with the first acquirer. When an acquirer terminates a MID, the package stays yours with no clawbacks and can be presented to another acquirer. The application flow, with your own ISO or directly, is on IBO for merchant account; the multi-processor logic is in payment processing for high-risk businesses.