The gateway your merchants will think you built.
Brand the gateway end-to-end. The portal your merchants log into, the vault their data lives in, the receipts they send, and the terminals they swipe on — all of it runs in your colors, on your domain, behind your SSL. We stay invisible by design.
What "white label payment gateway" actually means
A white label payment gateway is software you license from a technology provider, brand as your own, and resell to merchants. The provider runs the infrastructure — servers, certifications, network connections, redundancy — and you keep the customer relationship, the brand, and the economics.
The model only works if three things are true.
The brand has to be yours, top to bottom. If the technology provider's name shows up on a receipt, a portal banner, an email footer, or a terminal screen, it is not white-label — it is co-brand at best. The merchant has to look at every surface they touch and see the company they signed with, full stop.
The provider has to stay out of your merchant relationships. A white-label gateway that runs its own direct sales motion, or a side ISO program, or licenses a competing platform to your competitor next quarter, is a liability dressed up as a partner. The structural non-compete matters more than the contractual one.
The infrastructure has to be production-grade from the day you start. PCI Level 1, multi-region failover, real-time fraud telemetry, certified processor integrations. You cannot bolt this on after the first few merchants. The gateway is either built for this or it is not.
Fluid Pay was built for this. We have been partner-only since 2017, never run a direct sales motion, and inherit our partners into PCI Level 1 on day one.
How Fluid Pay's white-label works end-to-end
Hosting on a cloud-native stack since 2017
We host the gateway, set your second-level domain, and keep the lights on. No racks to rent, no failover plan to draft — your branded gateway inherits the same multi-region cloud infrastructure every Fluid Pay® partner runs on. Capacity scales with you; you do not have a conversation with us about server sizing.
PCI Level 1 — inherited automatically
Your white-labeled gateway is PCI DSS Level 1 the day it goes live. Your merchants' compliance scope drops because card data lives in our vault, not in their checkout pages or their CRM. For most flows your merchants run under SAQ-A or SAQ-A-EP, which is the lowest cost and audit burden the standard allows.
SSL down to the certificate
Your domain, your SSL — provisioned and renewed for us, by us. The customer sees your URL and your padlock, not ours. Renewals are automatic; you do not get a 3 AM alert because a certificate expired on a payment page.
DDoS mitigation included
Distributed Denial of Service attacks are routine in payments — the Q4 2021 Kaspersky data marked an all-time high and the trend has not reversed. Mitigation runs in front of every Fluid Pay®-hosted domain — including yours — so a bad actor pointed at your gateway hits a wall, not your merchants.
The white-label surfaces
Most "white-label" platforms cover the merchant portal and call it done. We cover every surface a merchant or their customers actually touch.
Logo
Drop in your logo and it appears on the merchant portal, hosted payment pages, e-invoicing emails, Fluid Cart, recurring billing notifications, and every receipt — all without touching code.
Colors
Match your brand identity end-to-end. Every accent, surface, and state color is configurable so the gateway feels native to your business, not a co-brand bolted to someone else's UI kit.
Custom components
Push it further with custom CSS. Match the typography, spacing, and component shapes of your existing product so the gateway becomes part of your stack — not a tab visitors have to context-switch into.
Receipts and notifications
Card receipts, ACH receipts, recurring billing reminders, refund notifications, dispute notifications. Every one is themed and templated under your brand, with your support email and your support number. Customers know who they are talking to when something goes wrong.
Terminal screens
For partners running card-present terminals, the idle screen, the tip prompt, and the receipt all carry your brand. Card-present is where most "white-label" stories quietly break; ours does not.
Pricing model
We price white-label like software, not like a processor.
A one-time activation fee covers brand setup, SSL provisioning, subdomain wiring, your processor integrations, and the initial portal configuration. A flat monthly platform fee covers everything ongoing — hosting, support, updates, network certifications.
We do not take a markup on the transactions themselves. You set the rate to your merchants, you keep the residual spread, and our economics stay in software. That alignment matters: as your portfolio grows, our cost-to-serve flattens and your unit margin gets better, not worse. Most gateway providers have the opposite incentive; ours points the same direction yours does.
Volume tiers exist for partners boarding hundreds or thousands of merchants. Talk to partnerships when you are ready to scope yours.
White-label vs ISO model vs PayFac model
These three patterns get conflated in conversation and they should not be. Each solves a different problem and carries different cost and risk.
| Question | White-label gateway | ISO model | PayFac model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who is the merchant of record? | The merchant | The merchant | You (the PayFac) |
| Who underwrites the merchant? | The acquirer | The acquirer | You |
| Who handles funding? | The processor | The processor | You |
| Who carries the chargeback risk? | The merchant | The merchant | You |
| Who owns the merchant brand experience? | You | Shared | You |
| Capital required to start | Lowest | Low | Highest |
| Time to first merchant | Days to weeks | Weeks | Months to a year |
| Best fit | ISO, ISV, reseller wanting brand control without risk | Traditional sales-led acquiring | High-volume platform that needs full control of the flow of funds |
Most software companies and resellers think they want PayFac when what they actually want is white-label. The brand control is the same; the risk, capital, and operational lift are not.
White-label is also additive: an ISO already collecting residuals can layer a white-labeled gateway on top of their existing program and stop sharing brand real estate with a competing gateway. Same residuals; better positioning; lower customer churn because the merchant sees one company across every touchpoint.
Migration without a rewrite
The merchants you already have are integrated against a different gateway. Rewriting their integrations to move them onto a new platform is the single biggest reason ISOs and ISVs stay on gateways they have outgrown.
Our Gateway Emulator speaks the request and response dialects of the legacy gateways most often left behind — so most merchants migrate by changing endpoints, not codebases. Their CRM integration, their ecommerce plugin, their internal tooling — none of it has to be rewritten. The deal stays closed; the residual stays yours.
Built for B2B and high-AR portfolios too
White-label is not just a brand decision; it is a product decision. Once the gateway carries your brand, every feature it ships under that brand is yours too.
That includes Level 3 credit card processing for the B2B and B2G merchants in your portfolio, the Customer Vault for repeat billing and card-on-file flows, Recurring Billing for subscription merchants, and WatchDog fraud controls tuned to your portfolio's risk profile rather than a generic internet-wide rule set.
The full Fluid Pay product stack — 20+ products — ships under your brand on day one. You are not stitching a white-label portal on top of someone else's API surface; you are reselling the whole platform.
Compliance, support, and the things that quietly matter
The unsexy parts of a gateway are where partners get burned in year two.
Compliance. We carry PCI DSS Level 1, the highest tier. Annual audits, quarterly scans, segmentation reviews. Your partner program inherits all of it. SOC reports are available under NDA for due-diligence cycles.
Support. Partner support runs on a Slack channel and a support portal — not a ticket queue you yell into. Production incidents get a human inside ten minutes during business hours and an on-call inside thirty after. Your support team has a direct line; your merchants never know we exist.
Uptime. We publish status; we run multi-region; we have not had a regional outage take the gateway down since the platform launched in 2017. Reliability is a feature your merchants will not thank you for and will fire you over.
These are not differentiators in the way "20 products on one platform" is a differentiator. They are the floor. We mention them because half the white-label gateways on the market do not clear them.
What to do next
If you are evaluating white-label gateways: request a partner demo and we will walk through the brand surfaces, the platform architecture, and the partner economics with someone who can answer technical and commercial questions in the same call.
If you are mid-migration off another gateway: ask about the Gateway Emulator on that demo. Most migrations are easier than the partner who is moving them expects.
If you already know you want to partner: apply to the partner program and we will respond within one business day.
Frequently asked questions
What is a white label payment gateway?
A white label payment gateway is a payment platform you license from a technology provider and resell to your merchants under your own brand. Your logo, colors, domain and SSL appear across every merchant-facing surface — the portal, hosted payment pages, receipts, e-invoicing emails and supported terminal screens. The technology provider stays invisible by design. Fluid Pay has operated as a partner-only white-label gateway since 2017, which means we never sign merchants direct and never run a competing program against the partners who resell us.
How is a white-label gateway different from a PayFac or ISO model?
A PayFac (payment facilitator) takes on the full risk and merchant-of-record relationship — they board sub-merchants under their own MID, underwrite them, and own the funding. An ISO (independent sales organization) sells processing under an acquirer's umbrella and earns residuals on the merchants they board. A white-label gateway sits one layer up: it is the software layer the merchant logs into, runs transactions through, and reports out of. White-label is the lowest-cost way to put your brand on payments without taking on PayFac risk or building a gateway from scratch — and it works equally well for ISOs, ISVs and resellers.
Do my merchants ever see the Fluid Pay brand?
No. The portal lives on your subdomain, with your SSL certificate, your logo and your colors. Hosted payment pages, receipts, e-invoicing emails and the supported terminal screens all show your brand. The few places Fluid Pay's name appears — terms of service, compliance disclosures where a technology provider must be named — are configurable and minimized by default. The goal is brand-true end-to-end; "white-labeled but with our logo in the corner" is not white-label.
Is PCI compliance scope inherited from Fluid Pay?
Yes. Fluid Pay is PCI DSS Level 1 certified. Because card data lives in our hosted vault rather than touching your infrastructure or your merchants', your PCI scope drops to SAQ-A or SAQ-A-EP for most flows. That removes the largest single cost and audit burden in running a payments program. Your white-labeled gateway inherits the full Level 1 posture the day it goes live.
How long does white-label setup take?
Standard white-label provisioning runs in days, not months. We handle subdomain setup, SSL provisioning and renewal, brand asset application (logo, colors, optional custom CSS), and your boarding workflow configuration. The longest items are usually on your side: deciding which processor relationships to wire up first, and finalising the merchant-facing copy you want on your hosted pages. A typical partner is taking transactions in their brand within one to two weeks.
Can I bring my own SSL certificate and domain?
You bring the domain; we provision and renew the SSL certificate for you so the cryptographic posture and renewal hygiene stay our responsibility. The customer sees your domain and your padlock — neither comes from us. If you already operate a corporate certificate authority and need to control issuance directly, talk to us; we have partners running that pattern.
Will you ever sell direct to my merchants?
No. Partner-only is not a clause in our contract — it is our entire business model. We have never run a direct sales motion and we do not license a competing platform that could quietly board your merchants behind your back. When a merchant reaches out to Fluid Pay directly, we route them to the partner who serves their market. The structural non-compete is the reason ISOs and ISVs choose us over gateways that have a side door to their own sales floor.
How is the white-label gateway priced?
Pricing is partner-tier: a one-time activation fee covers the brand and infrastructure setup, then a monthly platform fee that scales with the size of your portfolio. We do not take a markup on the transaction itself — you set the merchant pricing, you keep the spread, and we stay in software-economics rather than processor-economics. Volume tiers exist for partners with large books; talk to partnerships for the specifics that apply to your portfolio.