What NMI actually is
NMI sells the plumbing, not the merchant account, and it does not sell to merchants at all. Its own page for independent sales organizations states plainly that it does not recruit merchants directly. Its customers are ISOs, independent software vendors, banks and payment facilitators, who resell the NMI gateway under their own brand, set their own prices and own the merchant relationship end to end.
The practical consequence is that most businesses running on NMI have never heard the name. They bought a gateway from their processor, their POS vendor or their industry software company, and NMI is the technology underneath with somebody else's logo on it. That is the product working as intended.
Around the gateway, NMI has assembled a wider stack: merchant onboarding and underwriting workflow, lifecycle and residual management through IRIS CRM, device certification from Creditcall, a second gateway brand in USAePay, pricing intelligence from Fee Navigator, and — since May 2026 — account-to-account payments, ACH, FedNow and payouts through Dwolla. The pitch is that a partner can run an entire payments business on one vendor's software.
What NMI is not: an acquirer. It does not underwrite merchants, does not settle funds, does not hold money and does not carry acquiring risk.
How the model works and who carries what
Understanding NMI means tracing four parties rather than two.
- The merchant contracts with the partner, not with NMI. There is no NMI merchant agreement, no NMI pricing schedule and no NMI support line available to them.
- The partner — an ISO, software vendor, bank or payment facilitator — owns the merchant relationship, sets the merchant's price, and provides first-line support. NMI bills the merchant on the partner's behalf and pays commissions back down the chain, which is why the partner's brand appears on the statement.
- The acquirer underwrites the merchant, sponsors it into the card networks, settles the funds and carries the acquiring risk. That is a separate relationship the partner must arrange; NMI does not supply it.
- NMI provides the gateway: authorization routing to more than 150 acquiring processor connections, tokenization and the Customer Vault, hosted payment pages and Collect.js, fraud filters, 3-D Secure, chargeback tooling and device certification.
The processor-connection count is the structural point, not a marketing statistic. With a gateway wired to one acquirer, switching acquirers is a re-integration and a re-tokenization project. With one wired to a hundred and fifty, a portfolio owner can move merchants between acquirers, or split volume across them, without touching the integration. For an ISO with thousands of merchants, that is leverage in every acquiring negotiation it has.
NMI is a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider with P2PE and published EMV Level 1 and Level 2 certifications across more than 300 devices. It operates from Schaumburg, Illinois, with offices in New York, Bristol and Cape Town, and serves the US, Canada, the UK and Europe, reaching customers elsewhere through partners.
How NMI prices, and why a merchant cannot find out
NMI publishes no pricing at any level. Not a rate card, not a plan tier, not a starting point. That is consistent rather than evasive — a company that does not sell to merchants has no merchant price to publish — but it creates a real problem for the businesses paying the bills.
Platform pricing is negotiated per partner. The structural components are a per-transaction gateway fee, a monthly per-merchant platform fee, vault and stored-card charges, module fees for onboarding, lifecycle tooling, pricing intelligence and account-to-account payments, and device certification and terminal management charges. Partner minimums, volume commitments, contract length and exit terms are negotiated and unpublished.
For a partner, the absence of published pricing is normal for wholesale infrastructure and means the terms are whatever you negotiate. For a merchant, it means there is no external reference price and no route to one.
Where NMI is genuinely strong
Processor connectivity. More than 150 acquiring connections behind a single integration is the core asset and the hardest thing for a competitor to replicate quickly. It converts an acquirer relationship from a technical commitment into a commercial choice, which is exactly what a portfolio owner needs and what single-acquirer gateways cannot offer.
Card-present and unattended acceptance. The Creditcall acquisition brought a device certification capability that most gateway vendors treat as a cost center and NMI treats as a moat. Certifying an EMV device against a given processor is slow, expensive specialist work, and NMI's 300-plus certifications cover the unattended categories — kiosks, vending, EV charging, parking — where that work is the actual barrier to entry.
Embedded payments and payfac tooling. Sub-merchant onboarding, underwriting workflow, merchant lifecycle management and residual and commission distribution are packaged together, so a vertical software company can monetize payments without building a payment facilitator program from nothing.
The developer surface. A documented payment API, Collect.js for client-side tokenization, device SDKs, a large shopping-cart integration library and now Dwolla's API-first money movement are what a partner integrates once and resells many times. That reusability is the economic argument for the platform.
NMI can also serve high-risk portfolios, not because it has any appetite for that risk but because it takes none: underwriting belongs to the partner's acquirer, so whatever that acquirer will board, the gateway will carry.
Where it falls short
A merchant cannot buy it, price it, or escalate to it. There is no direct merchant channel. If the gateway goes down or a dispute needs investigating, the merchant depends on the reseller's willingness and technical competence to escalate. A capable ISO makes this invisible; a poor one leaves a merchant with a problem and no path to the company that can fix it.
Fee transparency is nil by construction. No published pricing at any level means no benchmark, and the retail price a merchant pays is a function of who sold it rather than what it costs.
It is not an acquirer, and a partner still has to be one or find one. Sponsorship, underwriting, settlement and risk arrangements remain the partner's problem. A software company hoping to buy payments-in-a-box from a single vendor will find NMI covers the technology and not the money.
The stack was assembled, not built. Creditcall, USAePay, IRIS CRM, Agreement Express, Fee Navigator and Dwolla all arrived through acquisition between 2019 and 2026. That leaves overlapping products — notably two gateway brands — and a consolidation roadmap partners depend on. Integration and roadmap risk are real for anyone standardizing on the platform.
Cross-border is limited. NMI operates in North America, the UK and Europe and relies on the partner's acquirer for multi-currency settlement rather than providing global acquiring itself.
Private-equity ownership carries its own dynamics. Francisco Partners has owned NMI since 2017, with later investment from Insight Partners and Great Hill Partners. An eventual exit — sale, recapitalization or listing — can change commercial terms for partners who built their business on the platform.
Crypto and stablecoin acceptance are not offered, and NMI publishes no agentic-commerce payment specification despite marketing AI-assisted pricing intelligence.
Ownership, acquisitions and the Dwolla deal
Network Merchants was founded in Illinois in a year widely reported as 2001, though NMI states no founding year in its own boilerplate and its founders are not publicly named. Francisco Partners acquired the business in 2017. In September 2021 Insight Partners made a strategic growth investment alongside Francisco Partners and Great Hill Partners, at which point NMI cited more than $180 billion in annual payments, over 3,200 partners and more than 260,000 merchants.
The build-by-acquisition record is the clearest way to read the strategy. Creditcall in 2019 brought UK EMV device certification and unattended acceptance; USAePay in 2020 added a second gateway brand; IRIS CRM in 2021 added merchant lifecycle and residual management for ISOs; Agreement Express's payments solutions, announced in December 2022, added onboarding and underwriting workflow; Fee Navigator added pricing intelligence. Steve Pinado became chief executive in August 2025, succeeding Vijay Sondhi.
The largest move came in 2026. NMI announced in January that it powered over $502 billion in annual payments volume, then acquired Dwolla on 19 May 2026, taking combined annual transaction volume to close to $700 billion. Dwolla is the strategically significant one: it takes NMI from a card gateway to a platform that also moves money over bank rails, adding account-to-account payments, ACH, FedNow and payouts through an API-first stack.
NMI's own site publishes more than 6,000 channel partners, over 1.2 million active merchants, 150-plus processor connections and 300-plus EMV device certifications. Those are self-published figures; headcount is not disclosed.
How to evaluate NMI, as a partner or as a merchant
The evaluation differs entirely depending on which side of the reseller relationship you sit.
If you are a partner considering the platform
- Confirm the processor connections you need are live and current — the headline count matters less than whether your acquirer, in your market, on your device types, is certified today.
- Get the consolidation roadmap in writing. Ask specifically which of the two gateway brands is strategic, what happens to the other, and what the migration commitment is if you are placed on the wrong one.
- Price the modules separately from the gateway. Onboarding, CRM, pricing intelligence and account-to-account are additional line items, and a quote for the gateway alone will not resemble your bill.
- Establish your own acquiring and sponsorship arrangements before you sign. NMI supplies technology, not settlement, and discovering that late is expensive.
- Read the term, the volume commitment and the exit provisions. None are published, so everything depends on what you negotiate.
If you are a merchant who found NMI on your statement
- Direct every pricing question at your reseller. They set the number. NMI will not discuss it with you and has no obligation to.
- Find out who your acquirer is — it is a different company from the gateway, it underwrites you, it settles your funds, and it is the party that can hold them.
- Ask your reseller what its escalation path to NMI is and what the response commitment is. An outage is the wrong time to discover there isn't one.
- Check what happens to your stored cards if you leave. Tokens live in the Customer Vault; ask whether they can be migrated and who arranges it.
Capability assessment
Every company profiled on this site is assessed against the same eighteen dimensions, so the profiles can be read against one another. Each rating carries one sentence of evidence. There is no score out of ten, because a score is not defensible and a sentence is.
Core strength means a primary, differentiating capability. Supported means genuinely offered and documented, but not a differentiator. Limited means partial, geographically restricted, gated behind an enterprise tier, or delivered through a third party. Not offered means what it says. Unclear means the company markets the capability but does not document it well enough to judge — which is itself a finding.
Who NMI suits
- ISOs and merchant service providers that want to own a branded gateway and the merchant relationship without building or certifying a gateway themselves.
- Vertical software companies that want to embed payments, board sub-merchants and take a share of processing without becoming a payment facilitator from scratch.
- Portfolio owners who need to move merchants between acquirers — NMI's 150+ processor connections mean changing acquirer does not mean re-integrating or re-tokenising.
- Businesses in unattended and self-service acceptance (kiosks, vending, EV charging, parking) where EMV device certification breadth is the hard part.
- Banks that want a modern merchant-acquiring front end without replacing their core.
Who NMI is a poor fit for
- Individual merchants: NMI states on its own ISO page that it does not recruit merchants directly, so a merchant cannot buy from NMI, cannot get NMI pricing, and has no contract with NMI.
- Anyone who wants price transparency: NMI publishes no pricing at any level, and the merchant's rate, monthly fee and contract are entirely whatever the reselling ISO or ISV decided — the same NMI gateway can cost wildly different amounts depending on who sold it.
- Merchants who want to escalate a problem: first-line support belongs to the partner, so a merchant with a gateway issue depends on the reseller's willingness and competence to escalate to NMI.
- Platforms that want acquiring and gateway from one vendor: NMI does not underwrite, settle or hold funds, so a partner still needs acquiring relationships and still carries the sponsorship and risk arrangements.
- Buyers who want an established, unchanging platform: NMI has assembled its stack through repeated acquisitions — Creditcall, USAePay, IRIS CRM, Agreement Express, Fee Navigator and Dwolla — which brings integration and roadmap risk for partners standardising on it.
- Organisations uncomfortable with private-equity ownership dynamics: NMI has been owned by Francisco Partners since 2017 with further investment from Insight Partners and Great Hill, and an eventual exit could change commercial terms for partners.
Competitors and alternatives
| Company | Why a business would choose it instead |
|---|---|
| Authorize.net | The best-known bring-your-own-acquirer gateway, but without NMI's white-label branding or processor-connection breadth. |
| Payrix (Worldpay) | Embedded payfac-as-a-service for software platforms, bundled with acquiring rather than gateway-only. |
| Stripe Connect | Platforms that want payments plus acquiring plus onboarding from one vendor rather than assembling acquirer relationships themselves. |
| Fiserv / CardPointe (CardConnect) | Gateway plus acquiring from a single large processor, simpler but with no acquirer choice. |
| Spreedly | Pure payment orchestration across many gateways, for merchants and platforms that want routing without the merchant-lifecycle tooling. |
| Payroc, Nuvei and other ISO-facing platforms | Competing white-label stacks that bundle acquiring with the gateway. |
NMI — frequently asked questions
Can a merchant sign up with NMI directly?
No. NMI states on its own independent sales organization page that it does not recruit merchants directly, and it sells only to ISOs, software vendors, banks and payment facilitators. A business gets the NMI gateway through a reseller, which brands it, sets the price, writes the contract and provides first-line support. There is no NMI merchant agreement and no direct merchant support channel.
Is NMI a payment gateway or a payment processor?
A gateway and embedded-payments platform, not a processor or acquirer. NMI authorizes and routes transactions to more than 150 acquiring processor connections, but it does not underwrite merchants, settle funds, hold money or carry acquiring risk. The partner's acquirer does all of that under a separate relationship the partner must arrange.
Who owns NMI?
NMI is privately held and private-equity backed. Francisco Partners acquired the business in 2017, and Insight Partners made a strategic growth investment in September 2021 alongside Francisco Partners and Great Hill Partners. NMI is not publicly traded and has no ticker as of July 2026.
How much does NMI cost?
NMI publishes no pricing at any level, because it does not sell to merchants. Platform pricing is negotiated per partner and typically includes a per-transaction gateway fee, a monthly per-merchant platform fee, vault and stored-card charges, and separate module fees. The price a merchant actually pays is set entirely by the reselling ISO or software vendor, so identical NMI gateways can cost very different amounts.
Why did NMI acquire Dwolla?
NMI announced the Dwolla acquisition on 19 May 2026, taking combined annual transaction volume to close to $700 billion. Dwolla adds API-first account-to-account payments, ACH, real-time money movement including FedNow support, and payout capability alongside NMI's card gateway. For NMI's partners it means one vendor for card acceptance and for disbursements, refunds and pay-by-bank flows that previously required a second integration.
How big is NMI?
NMI announced in January 2026 that it powers over $502 billion in annual payments volume, and after acquiring Dwolla in May 2026 cited close to $700 billion combined. Its own site publishes more than 6,000 channel partners, over 1.2 million active merchants, more than 150 processor connections and more than 300 EMV device certifications. These are self-published figures; NMI is private and does not file public financial results.
Why does my gateway bill say one company but the technology is NMI?
Because NMI is white-labeled. The reseller — an ISO, POS vendor or industry software company — presents the gateway under its own brand, sets the pricing and owns the customer relationship, while NMI bills on the reseller's behalf and pays commissions back down the chain. Any question about your rate, your monthly fee or your contract belongs to the company whose name is on the agreement, not to NMI.
Sources
This profile was built from the following primary and secondary sources. Where sources disagreed, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.
- https://www.nmi.com
- https://www.nmi.com/about-us/
- https://www.nmi.com/who-we-serve/independent-sales-iso/
- https://www.nmi.com/payment-gateway-product/
- https://www.nmi.com/about-us/news/nmi-acquires-dwolla/
- https://www.nmi.com/about-us/news/nmi-announces-strategic-growth-investment-from-insight-partners/
- https://www.nmi.com/about-us/news/nmi-acquires-agreement-expresss-payments-solutions-providing-more-value-for-
- https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260113034843/en/NMI-Caps-Landmark-Year-of-Growth-and-Innovation-Power
- https://secure.businesswire.com/news/home/20250812270104/en/NMI-Ushers-in-Next-Era-of-Embedded-Payments-with-N
- https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/nmi-purchases-iris-to-expand-merchant-services/617149/
- https://www.paymentsdive.com/news/nmi-aims-to-equip-banks-with-modern-payments-tech/624650/
- https://www.franciscopartners.com/media/francisco-partners-portfolio-company-nmi-announces-strategic-growth-in
- Founding year 2001 is widely reported but is not stated in NMI's own press boilerplate or About page; founders are not publicly named.
- Employee headcount is not disclosed.
- Exact dates for the Creditcall (2019), USAePay (2020) and IRIS CRM (2021) acquisitions were taken from secondary sources and not confirmed against NMI press releases.
- The Fee Navigator acquisition is referenced on NMI's About page but the announcement date was not confirmed.
- Whether NMI's current investor mix still includes Great Hill Partners as of July 2026.
- NMI has no Wikipedia article.