ISO partnerships
Plug in as a sub-ISO, or run our gateway in front of yours.
Two ways to grow with Superior. Onboard your agents and merchants under our sponsorship, or keep your back-end and put our PCI Level 1 gateway, AI fraud tooling, and modern APIs in front of it.
Two paths
Pick the partnership that fits your shop.
Most ISOs do one or the other. Some do both — sub-ISO for new merchants, gateway-as-a-service for the existing book.
Sub-ISO program.
Onboard your agents and merchants under our sponsorship and underwriting. Aggressive splits, lifetime residuals, real human underwriters, and a portfolio you actually own.
- Use our sponsorship and underwriting infrastructure
- Aggressive split structures, lifetime residuals, no clawback after 12 months
- Real underwriting team — high-risk and complex structures get human review
- Onboard agents under your ISO with our portal + e-sign + DB-of-record
- PCI Level 1 vault, SOC 2, ISO 20022 settlement, AES-256-GCM encryption
- Portfolio portability with reasonable terms if your situation changes
Gateway-as-a-service.
Keep your existing processor or sponsor bank. Drop our PCI Level 1 gateway in front. Your merchants get tokens, modern APIs, AI fraud tooling, and Stripe-compatible endpoints — without a re-board.
- Drop our gateway in front of your existing processor or sponsorship
- PCI Level 1 vault — your PCI scope shrinks, theirs goes to zero
- Tokenization, recurring billing, hosted checkout, mobile SDK, ACH
- Stripe / Square / Authorize.Net / Braintree API translation included
- Superior AI fraud detection + automated chargeback review on every transaction
- Webhook routing, retries, signature verification, dead-letter queues
Gateway-as-a-service in practice
Three ways ISOs use it.
Same gateway, three different jobs. Most partners start with one and add the others as the value compounds.
Modernize an old back-end
Your portfolio is on legacy rails — TSYS, FirstData, Worldpay — and the merchant experience around it is creaky. Plug Superior in front of the same back-end and merchants get tokenization, modern APIs, and AI fraud tooling without a re-board.
Add a gateway to your ISO
You've got the merchant relationships and the splits, but you're paying retail to a third-party gateway. Run ours instead — branded if you want, neutral if you don't — and capture the gateway margin yourself.
Power an ISV / SaaS
You're a software vendor adding payments. Our gateway gives you tokens, recurring billing, webhook reliability, and AI fraud out of the box. Wire-compatible with Stripe so your team doesn't have to relearn an API.
What's in the box
The platform you'll be running on.
Same engine that powers our direct merchants. No second-class tooling for partners — same vault, same AI, same APIs.
PCI DSS Level 1 vault
AES-256-GCM at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, HSM-backed key management. Tokens are useless outside the vault — even with full DB access.
ISO 20022 settlement
Native ISO 20022 messages on the back-end. Cleaner reconciliation, richer remittance data, and ready for the FedNow / RTN settlement world.
Superior AI on every transaction
Proprietary LLM scores fraud risk, predicts interchange optimization opportunities, and auto-builds chargeback rebuttal packages — included, not an upcharge.
Reliable webhook delivery
Signed webhooks, retries with exponential backoff, dead-letter queues, and a replay UI. Your downstream code doesn't have to defend against missed events.
Token portability in and out
Bring tokens in from a previous vault and we'll ingest them. If you ever need to leave, you take your tokens with you. No hostage data.
Stripe / Square / Auth.Net translation
Your downstream merchants don't have to rewrite code to run on Superior. Point their existing API calls at us and we translate request and response shapes.
What we need from you
A short conversation, then real numbers.
No 60-day diligence loop. Tell us what you run today and what you want to plug in — we'll come back with concrete terms within the week.
Your current setup
Sponsor bank, processor, gateway, monthly volume, primary verticals. We're trying to scope an integration, not interrogate you.
What you want to add
Sub-ISO sponsorship, gateway-as-a-service, agent onboarding, all of the above? The terms differ; tell us which one matters.
Anything sensitive
If you've had a previous arrangement go sideways, just say so. We'd rather know on the first call than be surprised in week three.
Let's talk partnership.
Tell us about your ISO and how you want to plug in. We'll get you on a call with the partner team this week.
Looking to sell for us as a 1099 agent instead? See the agent program →