RevKeen

A transparent Payment Facilitator with margin intelligence built in.

What is RevKeen?

RevKeen is a billing and payments platform that handles the full lifecycle of getting paid — subscriptions, one-off charges, invoices, checkout links, and in-person terminal transactions — on top of a transparent interchange++ pricing model. Unlike merchant-of-record platforms that bundle processing costs into a marked-up flat rate, RevKeen shows you every fee and every margin, per transaction.

Our tagline — Know What You Keep, Not Just What You Earn — is the operating principle. Every billing platform shows revenue. Only RevKeen automatically tracks processing fees, gateway costs, and infrastructure expenses so you can see your true margin on every sale.

Payment models: PSP vs MoR vs PayFac

There are three structurally different ways to move money from a customer's card to your bank account. Understanding which model you're using matters more than comparing headline rates — the model dictates what you're liable for, what's hidden from you, and where your margin goes.

Payment Service Providers (PSPs)

Examples: Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, PayPal (for processing).

PSPs give you direct access to the card networks through their infrastructure. You are the merchant of record for your own sales, meaning you're responsible for sales tax, VAT, chargeback liability, and regulatory compliance. PSPs typically quote a blended rate (e.g. Stripe at 2.9% + 30p) which absorbs interchange, scheme fees, and their margin into one number.

• Direct merchant account in your name
• Full control of the customer relationship
• Lowest headline fees
• You are responsible for tax compliance and chargeback exposure
• You cannot see interchange or scheme costs separately — they're blended into the rate
• No built-in billing operations (subscriptions, invoicing, dunning) — you integrate those separately

Merchants of Record (MoRs)

Examples: Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, FastSpring.

MoRs legally act as the seller of your products. The transaction is between the customer and the MoR; the MoR then pays you net of their fee. They assume sales tax, VAT, and chargeback liability across global jurisdictions. In exchange, they charge a higher blended rate (typically 4%–6%) with additional surcharges for international cards and subscription payments.

• MoR handles sales tax, VAT, and GST globally
• Chargeback liability transfers to the MoR
• Simple to get started — no merchant underwriting
• Highest fees of any model — often 6%–7%+ effective rate on international SaaS
• Your customers see the MoR's name on their statement, not yours
• Less control over pricing, checkout branding, and customer communications
• No visibility into processing costs — everything is bundled into the fee

Payment Facilitators (PayFacs)

Examples: RevKeen, Square, Stripe (Connect Standard), Shopify Payments.

PayFacs enable businesses to accept card payments under a master merchant relationship with an acquirer, without each business needing its own direct acquirer contract. The merchant remains the legal seller of record; the PayFac manages underwriting, compliance, and technical integration with the acquirer. PayFacs typically quote interchange++ pricing (passing interchange, scheme fees, and acquirer costs through at cost, with a platform margin separate).

• You remain the merchant of record with the customer
• Processing costs are visible and pass through at cost
• Faster underwriting than a direct acquirer relationship
• Lower effective fees than MoRs for most business profiles
• You remain responsible for tax compliance (though integrations like Quaderno automate this)
• Chargebacks come to you directly — the PayFac helps but doesn't shield you

Which should you choose?

As with most infrastructure decisions, there's no universally correct answer:

Choose a PSP (Stripe, Braintree) if:

• You have engineering resources to build billing, subscriptions, dunning, and customer portal yourself
• You want the lowest possible processing fees and will handle tax compliance separately
• You already have a direct acquirer relationship and don't need PayFac-style onboarding

Choose an MoR (Polar, Paddle) if:

• Your top priority is eliminating sales tax and VAT compliance work entirely
• You're a small software company selling digital goods internationally and don't want to think about tax
• You're willing to pay a premium (4%–7%+) for the MoR shield on chargebacks and compliance

Choose RevKeen (PayFac) if:

• You want to own the customer relationship and keep your brand on statements
• You want transparent pricing with visibility into processing costs
• You need a complete billing platform — subscriptions, invoicing, dunning, margin intelligence, customer portal — without integrating half a dozen tools
• You accept that you'll handle tax compliance (with help from integrations like Quaderno) in exchange for materially lower effective fees
• You want margin intelligence on every transaction rather than an opaque blended rate

How RevKeen works

The transaction flow

Every RevKeen transaction flows through four layers. Understanding the flow explains where each fee comes from.

1. Your customer enters card details at your checkout (hosted page, embedded form, payment link, invoice, terminal, or API call).
2. RevKeen tokenises and routes the payment through our NMI gateway to our acquiring partner.
3. The acquirer authorises the transaction with the card issuer's bank through Visa, Mastercard, or the relevant card network. This step generates interchange and scheme fees.
4. Funds settle from the acquirer to your bank account, typically next business day for UK merchants. Pass-through processing costs and RevKeen's fee are deducted at settlement.

You are the merchant of record throughout. The customer's statement shows your business name. The funds arrive in your account. The tax liability, chargeback exposure, and customer relationship are yours.

What RevKeen handles

• Billing platform — Subscriptions, invoices, one-off charges, checkout links, usage-based billing, trials, discounts, plan changes.
• Payment gateway — Tokenisation, 3-D Secure 2, basic fraud screening (AVS, CVV, velocity), and API access to process transactions.
• Customer operations — Hosted customer portal, multi-channel notifications (email, SMS, WhatsApp), automated dunning, customer health scores.
• Margin intelligence — Per-transaction cost tracking, margin analysis by customer, product, or geography.
• Compliance inheritance — PCI DSS Level 1 scope through our PayFac structure; you never handle raw card numbers.
• Integrations — Native integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, PracticeHub, Wodify, Quaderno, and custom integrations via webhooks, REST API, MCP server, or CLI.

What you remain responsible for

• Sales tax, VAT, and GST — You are the merchant of record. Tax calculation, collection, filing, and remittance are your responsibility. Our Quaderno integration automates calculation and filing across 100+ jurisdictions at a fraction of what an MoR markup would cost.
• Chargeback management — Disputes come to you. RevKeen provides tools to respond, pre-dispute alerts (Verifi CDRN, Ethoca where enrolled), and dunning automation to reduce disputes — but you make the decisions and incur dispute fees.
• Customer service — Your customers contact you, not us. RevKeen's customer portal reduces your support load by letting customers self-serve cancellations, payment method updates, and invoice downloads.
• Your products and services — What you sell, how you price it, how you fulfil it. RevKeen handles the money, not the merchandise.

Transparency

RevKeen is built on a specific conviction: merchants should be able to see every cost that affects their margin. This conviction shapes how the product works.

Interchange++ pricing, not blended rates

Most payment platforms quote a blended rate: one number that absorbs interchange, scheme fees, acquirer margin, and platform margin into a single headline figure. This is simpler to communicate, but it hides the actual cost structure from the merchant. You can't tell what's regulated (and therefore fixed), what's negotiable, or what the platform is marking up.

RevKeen quotes 1.7% + £0.10 as our platform fee — covering the billing platform, payment gateway, and basic fraud screening. Interchange, scheme fees, and acquirer costs pass through at cost, visible on your settlement statement at the exact percentage our acquirer charges us.

See the Fees page for a complete reference.

Margin intelligence (rolling out Q2 2026)

Configure the interchange, scheme fee, and acquirer cost rates from your acquirer's pricing schedule — with sensible defaults based on standard UK and EU published schedules to start. RevKeen then applies those rates to every transaction to compute your estimated margin, broken down by card type, geography, and product. Estimates reconcile against your monthly settlement statement over time.

No merchant-of-record platform can offer this at any price, because MoRs sit on top of blended PSPs and never see the underlying cost stack themselves.

Where RevKeen operates

RevKeen Limited is incorporated and regulated in Jersey, Channel Islands. We process payments through our acquiring partner on a global card network reach — which means customers anywhere in the world can pay a RevKeen merchant in a supported currency. Merchant underwriting is currently available for businesses based in the UK, Channel Islands, Ireland, and select EEA countries.

For complete coverage detail, see Supported Countries.

What you can and cannot sell

RevKeen serves a broad range of businesses — SaaS, digital products, professional services, healthcare, fitness, wellness, coaching, and coworking — but card network rules and regulated-industry restrictions apply. Some categories are prohibited; others require enhanced underwriting review.

For the complete policy, see Acceptable Use.

Frequently asked questions

Learn more

• Fees — complete pricing reference, including interchange++ pass-through and fee calculation examples
• Supported Countries — merchant and customer coverage, settlement currencies
• Acceptable Use — what you can and cannot sell through RevKeen
• Getting Started — account setup, gateway configuration, and first payment