Cardflo vs Stripe

Yes. Many merchants run Cardflo as a secondary or specialist rail for high-risk MCCs, cross-border traffic, or large-ticket commercial cards while keeping Stripe for low-risk consumer volume.

At meaningful volume, interchange-plus is almost always cheaper than blended pricing because the merchant captures the benefit of lower-cost cards. We're happy to model your card mix against a real Stripe statement.

Cardflo boarding typically takes 5–15 business days depending on vertical and KYB completeness. Stripe self-serve is faster for low-risk merchants who pass automated checks.

Stripe blends interchange, scheme fees and margin into a headline rate (typically 2.9% + 30c or a negotiated equivalent). Cardflo prices interchange-plus with acquirer margin visible per corridor, so on $25M premium-rewards-heavy card volume the effective cost is usually 30 to 60 bps lower, before any approval-rate uplift from account updater, network tokens and multi-acquirer routing on renewals.

Card-on-file portfolios move via Stripe's PCI-compliant vault-export process. Timelines are 6 to 10 weeks including scheme approvals, plus a 2 to 4 week parallel-run phase where a slice of renewals shadow-authorises on Cardflo before cutover. This staged approach avoids the approval-rate cliff that catches merchants who cut over cold.

Cardflo's risk layer runs rules, velocity, device and BIN heuristics with a merchant review queue. Merchants who prefer Radar can keep it in front and route only cleared traffic through Cardflo. Disputes flow into one queue with issuer deadlines surfaced up front, evidence auto-populated from order and shipping data, and representment handled per acquirer behind the scenes.

Every merchant gets a named payments manager plus a shared Slack or Teams channel with acquiring, risk and engineering. P1 first response is 15 minutes with a 4-hour root-cause SLA. Stripe's premium support tiers exist at enterprise volume but are ticket-based below that threshold.

Cross-border BINs, premium rewards portfolios and commercial cards see the biggest lift. Because Cardflo routes to a local Tier 1 acquirer per corridor, cards issued in the UK, Germany or Brazil authorise domestically instead of hitting Stripe's US or Ireland acquiring first. On mixed cross-border traffic we typically measure 1 to 3 percentage points of approval-rate uplift once the routing table is tuned against your BIN mix.

Every merchant is boarded directly onto the underlying acquiring bank under a merchant services agreement, with Cardflo as the ISO and technical partner. You have a real Merchant ID (MID) per corridor, statements from the acquirer, and named risk and pricing contacts. That is structurally different from Stripe, where the merchant of record and acquiring bank are bundled behind Stripe's own account.

Interchange rates depend on card type (consumer credit, debit, commercial, premium rewards), presentation (chip, contactless, e-commerce with 3DS) and enhanced data (Level 2 / Level 3 on commercial cards). Cardflo passes each qualified rate through at cost plus a fixed acquirer margin, so a portfolio that skews to debit or Level 3-eligible commercial spend captures the saving directly. Stripe's blended rate averages across all card types, so the same debit-heavy portfolio subsidises Stripe's premium-card losses.