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CSG ForteB72

Platform & Vertical SaaS · Utilities, municipalities, insurers, healthcare practices and property managers that collect recurring cons…

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Overview

$45

Best for: Utilities, municipalities, insurers, healthcare practices and property managers that collect recurring consumer payments and need ACH done well — particularly anyone who wants account verification and NSF recovery rather than just a debit rail.

Strengths

  • + The ACH product is genuinely deep. Three tiers of bank account verification — active-account checking, stop-payment and NSF history, and ownership authentication against a stated 596 million account records — plus automated NSF re-presentment up to twice within Nacha rules, with an average recovery rate CSG Forte puts at around 60%.
  • + It is a registered acquirer, not just a gateway. CSG runs underwriting, onboarding, processing, settlement, dispute management and risk monitoring itself, operating as an Elavon Payments MSP and a Registered MSP/ISO of Elavon, Inc., Georgia, and says most merchants are approved and processing in under 24 hours.
  • + Funding timing is documented publicly and precisely, day by day, including the risk-review hold — which most processors bury. You can plan cash flow against it before you sign, and choose a faster tier knowingly.
  • + The standard agreement we reviewed carries no early termination fee and no remaining-term liquidated damages. Exit is a 30-day written notice before the end of the term, with the account closing at the end of the billing cycle.
  • + Purpose-built for billers: convenience-fee and absorbed-fee models for government and utility collection, text and SMS payments, batch file processing for legacy back-office systems, and a real-time reconciliation console in CSG Dex.
  • + Scale behind it. The company reports 260 million transactions and more than $195 billion in payments annually across roughly 175,000 merchants, with more than 25 years of operating history under the Forte name.

Trade-offs

  • – Standard ACH funding can take up to six business days — submission, up to four days of risk and fraud review, release on day 5 and settlement on day 6 — and split-fund or Canadian-dollar merchants add another day. Compressing it means paying for Accelerated, Expedited or Same Day funding, priced monthly against volume.
  • – No pricing is published anywhere. The figures that circulate — around 2.90% plus $0.31 on cards, about $0.25 per ACH transaction, a $2.50 monthly gateway fee — come from directory and reseller listings, not from CSG Forte, and we could not corroborate any of them against a company document.
  • – The initial term is three years, with automatic one-year renewals unless you give written notice at least 30 days before expiry. Miss that window and you are committed for another year.
  • – The Better Business Bureau rates CSG Forte Payments, Inc. B- and it is not accredited, with the rating attributed to failure to respond to complaints. The complaints themselves describe the two problems that hurt most: funding held pending document review even after documents were supplied, and continued debits from a bank account after the merchant asked for billing to stop.
  • – CSG Forte can hold your funds without telling you first. Section 4.8 of the agreement reserves the right to place a funding hold with no prior written notice if it sees funding issues or irregular activity, or if a bank or network instructs it to, and section 18 lets it re-evaluate your volume, chargeback ratio and finances at any time and change your fees, your reserve, or end the relationship.
  • – Ownership above the business has just changed. NEC's Netcracker subsidiary completed its acquisition of CSG Systems International on 14 May 2026, taking CSG private and delisting it from Nasdaq. Nothing about the payments product has been announced as changing, but a newly private parent whose stated strategic focus is telecom software is a fact worth knowing before you sign a three-year term.

Fees in detail

  • Online rate: Not published. CSG Forte quotes per merchant based on volume and industry, and its own site carries no rate card. Third-party directories co
  • Disputes: Not published by CSG Forte. Third-party listings report $25.00 for chargebacks and returns, which matches the $25.00 returned-debit fee that
  • Contract: Three years. The Merchant Services Agreement (version 210927.01a) states the agreement has an initial term of three years from the effective date, and that after the initial term it renews automatically for successive one-year terms unless either party gives written notice of intent to terminate not less than thirty days before the end of the initial or a renewal term.

Standard published rate for a domestic online card payment. Confirm current pricing on CSG Forte's pricing page.

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