Definition
Acquiring banks classify merchants as high risk based on industry chargeback history, regulatory complexity, ticket size, and business model. Common categories include travel, nutraceuticals, CBD, adult, firearms, debt collection, telemarketing, and free-trial subscriptions.
High-risk accounts carry higher rates, rolling reserves, and stricter underwriting. Aggregators such as Stripe and Square prohibit many of these categories outright and freeze accounts without warning.
Example
A nutraceutical brand frozen by its aggregator moves to HL Hunt, is underwritten up front in 48 hours with a disclosed 5% rolling reserve, and never faces a surprise hold again.
How HL Hunt handles it
HL Hunt underwrites high-risk merchants directly with transparent reserve terms, multi-acquirer redundancy so one bank’s decision cannot shut you down, and AI dispute and fraud agents that keep ratios under network thresholds.