Riverside PaymentsC50
Merchant Account (ISO) · Businesses that want a local, hands-on account representative and a specific POS system — a restaurant on A…
Overview
Riverside Payments is a sales organisation first and a payments company second, and how your experience goes depends almost entirely on which representative you meet and what you make them put in writing. The company does answer complaints — that is why the BBB grades it A despite 256 of them in three years — and there are merchants who are satisfied. But the complaint record is unusually large for a company this size, it is remarkably consistent, and the recurring mechanism is the same one that has been costing small businesses money for thirty years: an attractive processing quote delivered alongside equipment that is described as free and financed by a separate lease you cannot cancel. C+ is a legitimate ISO with real support staff whose sales model reliably produces the complaints it produces.
Best for: Businesses that want a local, hands-on account representative and a specific POS system — a restaurant on Aldelo or TouchBistro, a retailer on Clover — and that are equipped to negotiate properly: get the full rate and fee schedule in writing, buy hardware outright, and refuse any separate lease. Merchants genuinely trapped in a bad contract elsewhere may also find the contract buyout offer useful, provided they read what they are being moved into as carefully as what they are leaving.
Strengths
- + A registered ISO of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., so the underlying merchant account sits with a major sponsoring bank rather than an obscure one.
- + The Better Business Bureau rates the company A, which in BBB terms means it engages with complaints rather than ignoring them — a real distinction from the worst operators in this sector, who simply do not reply.
- + Genuine hands-on service is part of the model: a named local representative, on-site installation and configuration of the POS, and help migrating from a previous provider.
- + A real POS range rather than one locked-in system — Clover, Dejavoo, TouchBistro, Aldelo and NCR — so a restaurant or retailer can be matched to software that suits it.
- + Taking over the cancellation of your existing merchant contract has practical value: processors make leaving deliberately difficult, and having someone else do that work is worth something.
- + There are positive first-hand accounts among the BBB reviews, specifically praising customer service, tech support and responsiveness — the service side is not uniformly poor.
Trade-offs
- – 256 BBB complaints in three years, 71 of them in the last twelve months, is a very large volume for a company of this size, and the themes barely vary from one complaint to the next.
- – Hardware presented as free is repeatedly reported to be financed through a separate, strictly non-cancelable 48-month third-party lease — with Cascade Equipment Leasing and TimePayment both named — at monthly amounts reported as high as roughly $190.
- – That lease outlives the processing account. Closing the merchant account does not close it, and the leasing company is a separate business with no obligation to you under the processing agreement.
- – An early-termination fee of $695 appears throughout the complaint file, with $499 also cited, and merchants report needing several attempts to cancel.
- – Nothing is published — no rates, no fees, no contract length, no funding times. Every number in this review comes from complaint records rather than from Riverside, because Riverside states none.
- – Quotes are commonly framed as a percentage saving against your current statement rather than as an actual rate and fee schedule, which is the presentation format most likely to obscure what you will really pay.
Fees in detail
- Online rate: Not published. Riverside quotes every account individually through its sales team, typically as a projected saving against the merchant's cu
- Contract: Not published.
Standard published rate for a domestic online card payment. Confirm current pricing on Riverside Payments's pricing page.
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