Payments and Processing Editing and Proofreading Services

Payments is an industry where the documentation is read by two entirely separate populations. Developers read the API reference and want completeness and precision. Merchants read the pricing schedule and the merchant agreement, and want to know what they will actually pay and under what circumstances money can be withheld from them. Providers who write well for the first group and carelessly for the second acquire merchants who churn, because the surprises in payments always arrive on the commercial side.

We edit what payment providers, acquirers and processors produce — merchant agreements and terms of service, pricing schedules and interchange-plus explanations, settlement and payout timing documentation, reserve, rolling reserve and withholding provisions, chargeback and dispute handling guides, integration and API documentation, hosted checkout and SDK guides, onboarding and underwriting communications, prohibited business and acceptable use policies, account termination and offboarding notices, scheme compliance and PCI documentation, incident and outage communications, and partner and independent sales organisation material. Our editors check that the effective cost of accepting a payment can be worked out from the documents given, and that anything permitting the provider to hold merchant funds is stated where a merchant will see it before signing.

The reserve provision is the clause that ends merchant relationships, and it is almost always buried. A business discovers, usually during its best trading week, that the provider is holding 10% of settlements for 180 days, or has frozen payouts pending review, and nothing they were shown at onboarding suggested this was possible. We rewrite these so the circumstances triggering a reserve are described concretely rather than as unfettered discretion, so the percentage, the holding period and the release mechanism are stated with an example, so the merchant is told what evidence resolves a review and how long it typically takes, and so the summary at onboarding mentions reserves at all — which most do not. Providers resist this because it makes onboarding harder. It also removes the single largest source of merchant complaints, regulatory attention and public criticism in the entire sector.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including merchant agreements, pricing and incident documentation. We are editors rather than legal or regulatory advisers and cannot confirm scheme or regulatory compliance — that stays with your counsel and compliance function. What we can do is make the documents precise for developers and honest for merchants, which are two different jobs in the same set of files.