Fluid Pay Named Payment Gateway Company of the Year 2026 by CIOReview

CIOReview named Fluid Pay Payment Gateway Company of the Year 2026, citing the work we have put into a single payments platform aimed at ISOs, agent groups and ISVs rather than at merchants direct.

The recognition arrived in the same month as a product milestone we have been working toward: certified support for the ID TECH VP3350 EMV device, now live across the Fluid Pay platform. The VP3350 handles EMV chip, magstripe and contactless (NFC) transactions, and it plugs into the same API partners already use for card-not-present processing. Same vault, same reporting, no second integration.

"Fluid Pay was designed from the ground up as a partner-only platform. Every feature, from onboarding workflows to API design, exists to make ISOs, agent groups and ISVs better at serving their merchants." — Nick Cucci, COO

A Gateway Built for the Channel

Fluid Pay does not board merchants direct. Partners do. The platform provides the infrastructure, APIs and tools that let partners own the merchant relationship and build a payment experience on top of one unified system.

• ISOs and agent groups get a single boarding workflow, flexible pricing configuration, and the option to move into new verticals without standing up new infrastructure.
• ISVs and SaaS platforms integrate against REST endpoints and hosted fields, so payment acceptance lives inside the platform UI rather than via a redirect.
• Card-present and card-not-present transactions run through a single integration. Same vault, same reporting, no second vendor.
• Security and compliance are the floor: PCI DSS Level 1 since 2019, end-to-end encryption and tokenization across the platform.

What the platform is solving for

The payments stack most partners are running today is fragmented. Different providers for the gateway, fraud, recurring billing and reporting. The result is a stack that does not line up: data lives in three places, support tickets bounce between vendors, and a chargeback spike on one product surface shows up at the bank instead of in the partner's dashboard.

"We built Fluid Pay to put the critical payment functions on one platform. Partners get one infrastructure to run instead of stitching four together, and the operational picture they get back is the one they need to actually manage a portfolio." — Theodore Cucci, CEO

WatchDog: Fraud Controls That Learn Your Portfolio

A core part of the platform is WatchDog, our real-time fraud detection engine. Rather than a single rule set written for the public internet, WatchDog lets partners tune controls per merchant. That keeps false positives down on lower-risk merchants and pulls the controls tight on the higher-risk ones, instead of putting everyone behind the same wall.

Account Updater: Keeping Recurring Revenue Off the Floor

A lot of recurring revenue leaks out through expired and replaced cards on file. The Account Updater runs the standard batched updater services for Visa, Mastercard, Discover and Amex against the cards in the vault, so the next recurring charge runs against current credentials rather than a hard decline.

"Most subscription-based merchants are losing 20 to 40 percent of their churn to credential failures they could have caught. Updater closes a chunk of that, and the math on it is one of the easier ROI conversations in the partner program." — Jeff Rooney, CTO

Recurring Billing: One Engine, Many Schedules

Recurring billing is no longer a niche use case. It is the core revenue model across SaaS, healthcare, fitness and member-based services. Our recurring engine handles subscriptions, installment plans and usage-based pricing on the same vault as one-off transactions, with adaptive retry logic, dunning, and tokenized credential storage.

VP3350: Card-Present, Certified, and Ready

Partners already on Fluid Pay for card-not-present can pick up the ID TECH VP3350 without a second gateway or a second integration. EMV and contactless capabilities ride the same API the online flows use. One platform, both transaction types.

Certification is complete, so deploys can start today. The VP3350 is the first in a planned series of hardware integrations aimed at giving partners more device options for the card-present side of their book.

What the recognition reflects

Being named Payment Gateway Company of the Year 2026 reflects nine years of work in the same direction: building a platform partners can run their business on, and not building anything that would compete with the partners doing the work.

The full CIOReview profile is here: Fluid Pay — Payment Gateway Company of the Year 2026.

About Fluid Pay, LLC

Fluid Pay™ was founded in 2017 and has been a Level 1 PCI DSS Service Provider since 2019. The platform is a partner-only payment gateway built for ISOs, agent groups, ISVs and software platforms across the United States.

Fluid Pay does not board merchants directly. The partner-only model is structural, and it is the only model we operate.