By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026
The first card payments ran on paper slips and a metal imprinter. Trust was a signature you could hold. Your product now moves money in milliseconds, invisibly, and trust is the only part a merchant can actually see. This guide judges agencies the way your buyers judge you: on fraud data, compliance deadlines and trade press, not on pitch decks. The Nilson Report counted 33.83 billion dollars in worldwide card fraud losses for 2023, and the United States absorbed 42.32 percent of those losses on 25.29 percent of the volume. In this industry, reputation is priced in basis points.
33.83 billion dollars: worldwide card fraud losses in 2023 (Nilson Report) 51: future dated PCI DSS requirements that became mandatory on March 31, 2025 (PCI Security Standards Council) 79 percent: share of organizations that faced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2024 (AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 2025)
I Discrimen
Uptime is not the same as trust
A processor can post five nines of availability and still lose the deal. Merchants, platforms and partner banks are not really buying transaction speed. They are buying the transfer of risk, and risk is a story told in advance.
That is the distinction your agency has to understand. Consumer PR sells desire. Payments PR sells the absence of fear, documented early enough that a risk committee can point at it during diligence.
Aphorism for the wall: nobody ever framed an authorization rate. Buyers frame the headline they find when they search your name next to the word breach.
Onboarding is where this becomes tangible. A merchant endures your underwriting, your reserve decisions and your risk holds before the first transaction clears, and every friction in that week is read as a preview of the relationship. Firms describe their fraud tooling as a feature list. Merchants experience it as silence or as explanation, and they retell the experience to other merchants in exactly those terms. An agency that studies your decline letters, your reserve notices and your dispute portal as communications artefacts is doing the real work of your brand, because that is the copy your customers actually read, word for word, while deciding whether you are safe.
II Machina
Your shortlist is built before the RFP exists
Processors like to believe selection is a spreadsheet exercise. In practice, the shortlist forms months earlier, in the reading habits of chief operating officers, bank partnership teams and platform product managers.
They read Digital Transactions, Payments Dive and the Electronic Transactions Association output. They hear speakers at Money20/20 and regional acquirer conferences. When your name is familiar in those rooms, diligence starts warm. When it is absent, your sales team pays for the cold start on every call.
An agency earns its fee by placing your executives inside that reading stream consistently. Start your scan of what a serious programme looks like on the Frontier Industries resources index and compare it with the coverage your competitors collected this quarter.
III Exemplum
The fraud table is the story, so own it
Consider the numbers every merchant already fears. The Nilson Report put United States card fraud losses at 14.32 billion dollars in 2023, a share of global losses far above the American share of spending. The AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey (2025) found business email compromise was the leading avenue of attack, cited by 63 percent of organizations, and checks remained the most targeted payment method, also at 63 percent.
A processor that publishes its own fraud basis points, chargeback ratios and dispute win rates against those benchmarks looks like an adult. A processor that hides behind the phrase bank level security looks like a vendor waiting to be replaced.
The example cuts both ways. When a rival publishes the data and you publish adjectives, the rival becomes the reference point in every article that follows.
IV Damnum
A bad headline compounds like a chargeback
Fraud losses are not the only cost in this market. The Nilson Report projects cumulative card fraud losses of roughly 403.88 billion dollars over the coming decade, which means scrutiny of everyone in the chain keeps rising.
When an outage or a breach lands, the first story written becomes the permanent summary of your company. Merchants rarely announce why they left. They just stop renewing, and your pipeline thins for reasons your board cannot see in the churn report.
The cost of weak communications is therefore deferred and disguised. It arrives as slower enterprise sales cycles, harder bank negotiations and a discount applied to your name in rooms you never enter.
V Regula
The compliance calendar is the controlling variable
On March 31, 2025, the 51 future dated requirements in PCI DSS version 4 became mandatory for every assessment, covering areas such as multi factor authentication for all access to the cardholder data environment and protection against payment page scripts. Every merchant you serve had to answer for those controls, and most of them were confused.
That confusion is an editorial market. The agency you want can translate assessor language into merchant plain speech, on deadline, without a compliance officer rewriting every line.
Test this in the pitch. Hand each finalist a dense requirement and ask for a 200 word merchant facing explanation overnight. The firm that needs a week, or produces copy your qualified security assessor has to gut, has told you what the retainer will feel like.
VI Segmenta
A gateway, a PayFac and an ISO do not buy the same press
Payments is a shelf of different businesses wearing one label. Your agency choice should follow your shelf, not the industry average.
| Business model | Primary buyer | Coverage that moves them | Story that falls flat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway and developer platform | Product teams and developers | Documentation praised in developer media, integration case studies | Consumer lifestyle features |
| Full stack processor | Mid market merchants and CFOs | Fraud data, uptime reporting, trade press analysis | Awards with no readership |
| Payment facilitator | Platforms and vertical software firms | Risk management explainers, partner bank confidence pieces | Generic small business cheerleading |
| ISO and merchant services reseller | Local and regional merchants | Regional business journals, vertical trade titles | National consumer coverage |
| Vertical payments software | Owners in one trade, such as dental or field services | The trade title of that vertical, read cover to cover | Broad fintech roundups |
One channel hides inside the table and deserves its own moment: the independent sales organisation and agent network. Thousands of agents retell your story to merchants every week, in diners and back offices, and what they retell is whatever your last sales sheet, webinar and rumour gave them. That is a media channel with a closing rate no publication can match, and it is almost never staffed by communications people.
Treat it as one. Equip agents with the same fraud data, the same compliance explainers and the same honest pricing anatomy you give journalists, refreshed on the same calendar. When a network fee story breaks or a rival's outage makes the news, your agents should receive the talking points before the group chats invent their own. An agency that asks about your agent channel in discovery understands distribution in this industry. One that only asks about your press list is planning to reach everyone except the people who actually sell for you.
VII Occasio
Real time and embedded payments are unclaimed ground
FedNow and the RTP network moved settlement from days to seconds, and embedded payments moved the merchant conversation inside software platforms. Both shifts are still narratively young. Very few mid sized processors own a clear point of view on either.
That is the opening. The firm that explains, in print, what instant settlement does to merchant cash flow and fraud exposure becomes the quoted source when journalists need a practitioner.
Journalists quote the person who taught them something. Teach first, and the citation follows without a pitch.
Embedded payments adds a second, quieter opening. As processing disappears inside software, the buying decision migrates from merchants to the chief financial officers and product heads of platforms, people who have never attended a payments conference and do not read payments titles. Reaching them requires a different shelf of media entirely: vertical software publications, platform economy newsletters and the finance press of each trade the platform serves. Most processors have not noticed the migration, and their agencies are still pitching the old room. Notice it first, and your firm becomes fluent in two rooms while competitors argue in one.
VIII Aequitas
A forty person specialist can out publish a global acquirer in one niche
Scale buys a processor many things, but it does not buy the dental payments page of a vertical trade title. Inside a defined niche, structure beats size: a named expert, a data point, a merchant willing to be quoted.
The AFP survey (2025) reported that 79 percent of organizations faced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2024. Every vertical you serve felt that number personally, and every vertical editor needs someone to explain it locally.
A focused agency with two senior people who know your niche will beat a famous firm that assigns you a rotating cast. Ask who writes, not who pitches.
IX Consilium
Score the finalists on payments fluency, not on logos
Use two tables. The first maps agency types to your stage. The second is the scorecard to run in the room.
| Agency type | What you gain | What you give up | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payments specialist boutique | Instant fluency in interchange, chargebacks and PCI language | Smaller bench during a crisis week | Processors under 500 staff selling to merchants |
| Fintech practice inside a large agency | Bank and regulator media relationships, crisis depth | Senior attention, and speed of approval | Firms courting bank partnerships or preparing an exit |
| Generalist technology agency | Strong product launch mechanics | A learning curve paid for with your retainer | Platform plays where payments is one feature |
| Senior freelancer plus in house lead | Continuity and low overhead | No cover when the freelancer is away | Early stage firms with one strong internal writer |
| Criterion | Weight | What good looks like | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Payments vocabulary | 25 percent | Interchange, basis points and dispute timelines used correctly, unprompted | Pitch deck says blockchain enabled payments revolution |
| Trade media record | 20 percent | Named placements in payments titles within the last year | A clip book of consumer lifestyle mentions |
| Crisis rehearsal | 20 percent | A written outage and breach protocol, tested on a tabletop | We will figure it out if it happens |
| Compliance review discipline | 15 percent | Copy passes a security reviewer without legal surgery | Claims that need a footnote to survive |
| Measurement | 10 percent | Reporting tied to pipeline stages and partner inquiries | Monthly reports that count clips and impressions |
| Writing seniority | 10 percent | The person in the pitch writes the first three releases | A handover meeting in week one |
Before any annual contract, run a paid pilot with a defined editorial object: one compliance explainer campaign built around a PCI milestone, or one fraud data release built from your own numbers. Ninety days is enough to observe the things a pitch conceals: how the draft reads before your edits, how the agency behaves when a trade editor pushes back on a claim, and whether the reporting counts what your sales team recognises as progress. Processors buy infrastructure on trials and references. Buy communications the same way, and let the losing finalists keep the pitch fee as the price of your education.
Before you sign, read how a specialist firm describes the service itself on its public relations services page, and notice whether the language survives your own compliance sniff test.
X Quaesita
Questions processors ask before they sign
How much should a payment processor spend on PR?
Most mid sized processors land between a focused boutique retainer and a mid five figure monthly programme. The honest driver is output volume: two strong trade placements a month cost less than a launch machine. Pay for seniority in this industry, not for headcount.
Is a payments specialist worth more than a famous generalist?
Usually, yes. Your buyers read a small set of trade titles and attend a small set of conferences. A specialist already holds those relationships and speaks the vocabulary of risk teams, which is where your deals are actually decided.
What should PR do during an outage?
Speak early, in plain words, with a time for the next update, and keep that appointment even if the update is that work continues. Silence lets affected merchants write the story for you, and they will not be generous editors. Your agency should arrive with the holding statement already drafted.
How do we talk about fraud without frightening merchants?
Publish your numbers next to the market numbers. The Nilson Report figures are frightening in the abstract. A processor whose fraud basis points sit visibly below the industry rate turns the same data into a sales asset.
Can PR help us win bank partnerships?
Indirectly, and it matters. Sponsor banks run their own diligence, and part of it is reputational. A record of sober, accurate coverage in the trade press gives a partnership team something to file. Read how agencies present their own teams on an about page and ask whether that standard of clarity matches what a bank would want to find about you.
How soon does coverage change sales conversations?
Trade coverage starts warming outbound calls within a quarter, because prospects begin recognizing the name. Enterprise and bank cycles move slower. Judge the programme on shortlisted deals and partner meetings after two quarters, not on clip counts after two months.
What should we prepare before the first meeting?
Bring your fraud and uptime data, your PCI attestation status, three merchant references willing to talk, and a named executive who will actually take interviews. Agencies cannot manufacture proof. They can only distribute the proof you hand them.
How should we handle interchange and pricing scrutiny?
Expect merchants to blame you for card costs set largely by networks and issuers, and expect that confusion to reach journalists intact. Your agency's job is patient separation: which fees are interchange, which are network assessments, and which thin slice is actually your margin, explained with the same numbers every time. The processors who publish that anatomy lesson, unprompted, are quoted when a pricing story breaks. The ones who go quiet are assigned the whole bill in the reader's mind, and the assignment sticks for years.
Should our agency also handle analyst and association work?
For processors, yes, if the buyer map includes platforms and banks. Association platforms such as the Electronic Transactions Association shape the rooms where partnerships begin. Treat speaking slots as coverage with better catering, and staff them accordingly. Compare candidate firms against guides for adjacent buyers, such as choosing a PR agency for accounting firms, to see how diligence expectations differ by audience.
XI Methodus
How this guide was built, and where it is thin
This guide was built from published industry sources: the Nilson Report fraud tally for 2023, the PCI Security Standards Council version 4 timeline, the AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey (2025), and the trade press those organizations feed. No processor was interviewed, and no agency was paid or consulted.
Limitations, stated plainly. Fraud totals are estimates compiled by a trade publication, not audited accounts. Survey figures are self reported by treasury professionals. The picture is United States centric, and a processor selling mainly in Europe or Latin America should reweight the media map before using the scorecard.
One more limit deserves emphasis because it expires fastest. Card network rules, interchange politics and routing legislation all move, and each movement redraws the communications map overnight: a fee story can become a congressional story between one news cycle and the next. The scorecard's weights are durable, because fluency and discipline outlast any rulebook. The specific story examples are not, and a wise firm re tests them against the current network bulletins every year.
XII Incipe
Where Frontier Industries fits
Frontier Industries is the industry focused practice behind this guide, and it works the way the scorecard above demands: senior writers, trade press first, compliance safe language, and reporting tied to meetings rather than impressions. If your shortlist needs one firm that already speaks in basis points, start with a working session, not a credentials deck.
Call 401-219-4207 or open a brief at the industry campaign page and bring your fraud numbers. We will bring the questions a risk committee would ask.
Sources
1. Nilson Report, Card Fraud Losses Worldwide in 2023. https://nilsonreport.com/articles/card-fraud-losses-worldwide-in-2023/ 2. Nilson Report press release, Payment Card Fraud Losses Approach 34 Billion Dollars, GlobeNewswire, 2025. https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/01/06/3004931/0/en/Payment-Card-Fraud-Losses-Approach-34-Billion.html 3. PCI Security Standards Council, PCI DSS version 4 resources. https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/ 4. Association for Financial Professionals, 2025 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, key highlights. https://www.truist.com/content/dam/truist-bank/us/en/documents/info/cci/2025-afp-payments-fraud-control-survey-report-key-highlights.pdf?ref=blog.talli.ai 5. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, The Federal Reserve Payments Study. https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fr-payments-study.htm 6. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, payments and consumer finance resources. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ 7. Digital Transactions, payments industry news and analysis. https://www.digitaltransactions.net/ 8. Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/consumer-sentinel-network-data-book-2024 9. Nacha, ACH Network rules and education. https://www.nacha.org/ 10. Electronic Transactions Association, industry resources. https://www.electran.org/