Nine underwriting rejections in a row — I think I'm on the terminated list and nobody will confirm it

Some background, because the pattern only makes sense with it.

The company account was terminated in November. The letter gave no reason beyond risk appetite; there was no chargeback event, no dispute, and the final statement was clean. Since then I have applied to nine acquirers and payment facilitators. Nine applications, nine declines, all at underwriting, none with a reason.

Two of them declined within four minutes of submission. That is not a human reading a file.

The working theory is obvious: the terminated merchant file, MATCH, TMF, whatever the acronym is in your jurisdiction. The problem is that nobody will confirm you are on it. The acquirer that put you there is the only party who can remove you, and mine will not respond to a written request.

So the question, and I would like practical answers rather than sympathy: has anybody here actually had a listing removed, and what did the process look like? I will document everything I try in this thread with dates, because I could not find a single account of it on this board or anywhere else.

five years. that's how long it stays. nobody removes anything, they wait it out

What was the reason code on the termination letter? There's usually a number even when there's no sentence.

There is no code on the letter. I have asked for one twice; the second request was acknowledged and not answered. I am told informally that the code exists in their system and is not disclosed to the merchant, which I have not been able to verify.

The four-minute declines are the useful signal. That is a database lookup, not underwriting, and it means the answer to whether you are listed is effectively yes even though nobody will say it out loud.

Two practical things while you work the removal angle. First, stop applying. Every declined application is itself recorded, and a run of them looks worse than the original listing. Second, ask each acquirer that declined you for the specific reason in writing — in some jurisdictions they must tell you which database was consulted even if they will not tell you what it said.

nine in a row is brutal man, hope you get it sorted!!

you're nine rejections deep into asking permission from an industry that already said no.

I am aware of the other rail; I have a crypto checkout running and it covers perhaps a fifth of my customers. The remaining four fifths pay by card because that is what they do. Telling them otherwise is not a strategy, it is a smaller business.

That's a fair objection and it's the one that usually ends this argument, but I'd push on the fifth.

A fifth of your customers already chose the crypto path when the card path was available and easier. That isn't a ceiling, it's a floor measured under the worst possible conditions — no prompt, no incentive, card presented first. IME when the card option goes away entirely the crypto share does not stay at twenty per cent, it lands somewhere in the forties, and you find out which of the other sixty per cent were never going to buy anyway.

If you're going to lean on that rail while the listing runs out, run it yourself rather than through a hosted gateway. BTCPayServer on your own box, payments direct to your wallet, zero protocol fee, and — the part that matters given where you are — no operator with an underwriting function that can decline you. Nobody can put you on a list for something they never onboarded you to.

The trade is real and I'm not going to pretend otherwise: you own a server, a node and a set of keys, and when it breaks at 3am it breaks for you. Budget a weekend for setup and an evening a month afterwards. That's the actual price, not the zero on the fee page.

Hosted email-only gateways are the middle option and they're fine until your volume gets interesting, at which point they ask you the questions you're currently failing.

Agreed on the mechanism. Add the obvious: the listing followed your company identity. Rebuilding under the same identity on a different rail keeps that identity intact, which is what you want here and is not always what people want.

whats MATCH

a list of merchants acquirers won't touch. search it

Day 9 of the process, such as it is.

Sent a written request to the terminating acquirer via the data protection route rather than the payments route — a subject access request for all personal data held, which they are obliged to answer in a way they are not obliged to answer a merchant enquiry. Acknowledged the same day. They have a statutory month.

Also stopped applying, per the advice above. Three of the nine had come back with a template line about information obtained from third party sources, which is the closest thing to a confirmation I have.

That's the first genuinely new idea in this thread. Going round the payments process via the data process is not something I've seen anyone here try.

I have watched three of these from close enough to see the paperwork, none of them mine, and what strikes me every time is how much of the confusion is structural rather than adversarial. So, the machinery.

Who owns the listing

The acquirer that terminated you owns the entry. Not the card scheme, not the acquirer who just declined you. The scheme runs the database; it does not adjudicate what is in it. This matters because every hour spent writing to the scheme is an hour spent writing to a filing cabinet.

The consequence people miss: the only entity with the power to remove you is the one that no longer has you as a customer and has nothing to gain from the paperwork. That is why this is slow. It is not malice, it is that your file sits at the bottom of somebody's queue forever.

What actually gets a listing removed

From what I have seen, three things:

1. The listing was factually wrong. Wrong entity, wrong reason code, a chargeback ratio that was miscalculated. This is the only category with a reliable path, and it is a documentation exercise: you produce the correct figures and they correct the record.
2. A regulator or a data protection authority gets involved. Slow, but the acquirer's incentive changes completely once a statutory clock is running. This is the route quietaccountant has just taken and it is the right one.
3. Time. Five years, and it ages off on its own.

There is no fourth category where you write a persuasive letter and somebody reconsiders. I have never seen that work and I would be genuinely interested if anyone has.

What to do in the meantime

Do not apply again until you know. A pattern of applications is visible and it reads as evasion. Do not open a new entity with a different director at the same address selling the same product — underwriting has been matching on that combination since long before any of us started, and being caught at it converts a five-year problem into a permanent one.

Run whatever rail will have you, keep the books clean enough that when the listing clears you can walk into a proper application with three years of tidy history, and treat this as a five-year plan that might end early rather than a problem you are about to solve.

Where I am uncertain

I do not know how consistently the data protection route works outside the EU and UK, and I would not want anyone reading this elsewhere to assume it transfers. I also do not know whether a removal, once granted, leaves a residual trace that acquirers can still see. Nobody has ever been able to tell me.

Short version: you cannot argue your way off, you can sometimes correct your way off, and mostly you wait — so build the five-year version of the business now.