Stripe bundles the gateway, the merchant account, and the underwriting into one provider, which is wonderful right up until underwriting says no. NMI unbundles it: a gateway that connects your checkout to a merchant account you hold, including accounts underwritten for high-risk categories. You trade some of Stripe's polish for something restricted categories need more: the ability to change processors without touching the checkout.
← Our stack 
NMI when the category makes processors nervous.
A payment gateway that underwrites regulated and high-risk commerce on purpose, and decouples the checkout from any single processor. For risk-adjacent brands, that decoupling is the whole point.
nmi.com ↗How we use NMI
NMI is our gateway layer for commerce in categories mainstream processors decline: smoke-adjacent products, CBD and hemp, supplements, and other legal businesses that live outside standard underwriting. Architecturally it sits between the storefront and the merchant account, which is what makes it strategic. The gateway integration, the tokenized cards in its Customer Vault, and the recurring billing logic all survive a processor change, so if an acquirer exits the relationship the business swaps the account behind the gateway instead of rebuilding checkout. We wire it into our Medusa and Next.js builds through the same payment provider interface as every other rail, with server-side capture and webhook-driven order state.
A processor decision should be a configuration change, not an extinction event.
Why NMI
For a risk-adjacent brand, the biggest threat to revenue is not fraud or chargebacks. It is a processor deciding, on its own schedule, that the category is no longer welcome. NMI is built for exactly that world: it underwrites high-risk verticals deliberately, supports multiple merchant accounts behind one gateway, and its Customer Vault keeps tokenized payment methods portable across processors. That turns the worst-case event from a rebuild into a configuration change. It is the payments expression of the same principle our whole infrastructure practice is built on: owned foundations, no single point of platform failure.
Payments for the categories platforms won't touch
There is a growing class of excellent products that are legal everywhere and still treated as radioactive by mainstream payments: smoke-adjacent accessories, CBD and hemp, supplements, adult wellness. These brands share a structural problem, and it is the same one that gets them deplatformed from hosted commerce: the better they grow on infrastructure that merely tolerates them, the more they stand to lose the day a policy shifts. We build their payment stacks the way we build their platforms, owned and diversified. NMI is the gateway layer in that architecture because it underwrites these verticals on purpose and keeps the merchant account swappable behind a stable integration. The checkout the customer sees never changes; the rails behind it can.
The Customer Vault is the strategic asset
For a subscription or repeat-purchase business, the tokenized cards on file are among the most valuable operational assets the company owns, and on most platforms they are held hostage: leave the processor, lose the vault, re-ask every customer for a card. NMI's Customer Vault breaks that dependency. Payment methods tokenize at the gateway layer, above the processor, so recurring billing continues through an acquirer change without a single customer noticing. When we design recurring revenue for a risk-adjacent brand, that portability is a hard requirement, not a nice-to-have, because in these categories processor churn is a matter of when.
Where we use it
Risk-Adjacent Storefronts
Gateway processing for categories outside mainstream underwriting, integrated into custom Medusa checkouts with full order-state discipline.
Recurring Billing That Survives
Subscriptions vaulted in NMI's Customer Vault, so tokenized cards and billing schedules outlive any single merchant account.
B2B and Wholesale Rails
Card-not-present processing for gated wholesale portals, alongside invoice and wire flows, on the same gateway.
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