1st National Payment Solutions Review: Fees, Complaints & Lawsuits

Under 10 BBB Complaints

1st National Payment Solutions has been accredited with the Better Business Bureau since 2006. As of this review, the company has an “A+” rating with the BBB and has had 1 complaint filed against it in the last 36 months. The 1 complaint was resolved to the satisfaction of the merchant.

What Merchants Say

In addition to the 0 complaints posted to the company’s BBB profile, 1st National Payment Solutions has received 0 informal reviews in the last 36 months. Prior to that period, we documented 1 negative review that detailed difficulty closing the merchant account:

Run away as fast as you can. We just got hit with a brand new, unannounced $99 annual fee. The money has already been taken from our bank account and they refuse to return it. There was no letter, no email, no bank statement announcement notifying us of the new fee. They say they sent out a letter a month ago, and that’s the end of it. The fact that we never received such a letter means nothing. They say that they looked at their costs and decided that they needed to charge a fee, so they just did it. The guy was quite nasty about it, and told me there was nothing I could do about it, they have the money and they’re not giving it back. The service rep stated that they have received many calls of complaints about this and they will not be refunding these fees to any of the customers. When I called ********** Bank, whom they use, the bank transferred my call right back to 1st National’s office. I got the same jerk on the phone. In the past, I’ve never been treated this way by them, and their reps have behaved decently. This guy was over the top nasty. 1st National Processing targets artisans and microbusineses in their advertising, which is we how came to use them several years ago. They have since changed the “Processing” to “Payment Solutions”, but they’re still the same people. At the end of each year, we did cost comparisons of total annual charges, to see what we would have paid had we run cards through PayPal or Square. 1st National always came in higher, but with human customer service, we stayed with them. That changed this past January. It is now mid-November. We kept 1st Nat as a backup, but have not used them more than once or twice since January. There were just too many times when we had to call because there were unexpected and confusing charges. Those were generally resolved, but we got tired of it, and when they mistakenly charged us for one of their other customer’s fees, we were done. We saw that customer’s info on our statement. It’s a security breach. It’s cheaper to let our contract die off than pay their extortionate $295 kick-out fee.

Merchants in similar situations could benefit from researching how to cancel a merchant account without paying a fee.

An “A” Rating

1st National Payment Solutions also has not received any informal reviews, although it should be noted that these reviews are not subject to verification by the BBB. Given the company’s low complaint total, we agree with the BBB’s rating at this time.