Clearly Payments
“Can a low-cost, transparent merchant acquirer in Canada build a full-stack payments-and-capital platform for SMBs and ISVs across North America?”
HQVancouver, British Columbia, Canada
IndustryFintech / Payments
The story
Clearly Payments launched as a merchant acquirer and payment processor focused on transparent interchange-plus pricing for Canadian and US businesses, positioning itself against opaque legacy processors. The company has expanded its stack beyond pure acquiring into gateway infrastructure, payment hardware, and merchant lending. More recently it has built an ISV/platform channel to embed payments into third-party software — shifting from a direct merchant model toward a payments-infrastructure-for-platforms posture.
Last 12 months
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The stack
3 layers disclosed in Clearly Payments’s embedded-finance stack
Payments / PSP
Elavon (US Bancorp Canada Branch) (acquiring)
Lending
in the full report
Accounting
in the full report
Accounting gap: minor
6 more providers across 2 layers, with confidence-scored evidence and source URLs, are in the Embedded Finance Index report.