Moneris dominates the small and mid-sized enterprise market, so any price increases are going to hurt those businesses
After relying on Moneris Solutions Corp. for 15 years, Toronto-based business owner Paul Bains started using a different payment processor to handle his credit and debit transactions in late 2025 primarily because he was offered a discount.
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Bains, who has been in the printing business since 2005, decided to switch to a company based in the United States, which was a lot bigger than Canadian-owned Moneris. A few months in, however, he realized he had made the wrong decision.
“It did not work out because they are really big and they didn’t care much about small businesses like mine,” he said. “Whenever there was an issue or a larger-than-usual transaction, they made my life so hard and demanded so much information. That was really surprising.”
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For example, Bains said during the FIFA World Cup, his company, which also accepts apparel-related printing projects, made more sales than usual, including a $50,000 transaction, the payment for which took two weeks to go through because he had to submit a series of documents to convince his payment processor it was not a scam. As a result, it was difficult for him to pay his vendors.
“We don’t have that kind of capital lying around to wait for two to three weeks,” he said.
Bains understands that suspicious transactions need to be checked, but he said payment processors need to understand that when it comes to small businesses, it’s tough to predict the value of transactions and that they may surge during specific periods.