Apex Pay · Frequently asked questions
Plain answers, and who decides what.
Apex Pay builds payment products on hosted provider rails as a registered partner of Maverick Payments — we are not a bank or a processor, and we never touch card data or your funds. Fees, settlement timing, and underwriting decisions belong to your provider agreement; our job is onboarding, hosted flows, and the daily reconciliation that keeps all of it visible.
The basics
What Apex Pay is — and is not.
Who is Apex Pay?
Apex Pay is a payment products company that does business as Apex Intelligence AI under Apex Intelligence AI Inc, and is a registered partner of Maverick Payments.
We build the product and operations layer around a merchant account — onboarding, hosted payment flows, and daily reconciliation — while the provider's certified rails carry the payments themselves. Every merchant agreement names every party, so you always know exactly who you are dealing with.
Are you a bank or a payment processor?
No. Apex Pay is neither a bank nor a payment processor, and we never hold your funds.
Money moves from your customer to the payment provider to your business's own account — a flow with four stops, and we are none of them. We build the product around that flow and stay out of the money itself. See the flow, stage by stage.
Where does my customers' card data live?
Card data lives on Maverick Payments' certified infrastructure and never touches Apex Pay's servers.
Checkout, invoicing, and payment links all run on the provider's hosted surfaces, so we never store, process, or transmit raw card data — PCI scope stays with the processor, where it belongs.
Money
Fees, settlement, and what things cost.
Who sets the fees on my merchant account?
Your fees are set by the provider agreement between your business and the payment provider — Apex Pay does not set or quote rates.
What we do is make those fees legible: every fee the provider charges appears itemized in your reconciled view, so you always know what you paid and what you paid it for. Our guide to reading them starts with your effective rate.
When do my funds settle?
Funds settle on the payment provider's rails, on the timing set in your merchant agreement.
We do not move the money and cannot change the schedule — what we do is make it visible. Expected payout is compared against actual every day, so if a settlement lands late or short, you know the day it happens rather than at month end.
What is an effective rate?
Your effective rate is everything you paid in processing fees in a month divided by the card volume you processed — the one number that says what accepting cards actually costs you.
It is the honest way to compare processing costs, because it includes every fee, not just the headline rate. How to compute yours, and what drives it up or down, is on our savings page.
Getting started
Applying, underwriting, and trying it first.
What does underwriting need from me?
Underwriting needs your formation documents, ownership details, licenses, and processing history as they actually are — underwriters verify everything against public record.
A mismatch between your paperwork and the record costs more time than anything else in the process, and someone with authority to sign the provider agreement needs to be reachable while underwriting is open. The decision itself belongs to the provider; we do not promise approvals — we make sure the package arrives complete the first time.
How does the guided application work?
You complete a business profile with one of our payment sales associates, then finish everything sensitive on Maverick's hosted boarding application with e-sign.
It is one application package instead of re-typing the same PDF four times, and when underwriting comes back with questions, we answer from the file — usually without coming back to you at all. You can walk the entire flow in the sandbox before anything real is submitted.
Can I try Apex Pay before applying?
Yes — the sandbox lets you run a hosted test payment and walk the guided application with no real money and no commitment.
It exercises the same two flows our merchants use in production, against Maverick's sandbox rails with Maverick test cards. When you have seen how it works, the application is the same path with real details. Open the sandbox.
Operations
The daily work after go-live.
What does daily reconciliation cover?
Daily reconciliation matches five records every day: sessions, captures, refunds, disputes, and payouts.
The payout the provider settles is compared to the payout the ledger expects, and any variance is chased the day it appears — not discovered at month end. Most days the answer is a balanced book; on the days it is not, you see the cause and its age in days.
What do you do about chargebacks?
We keep the records and assemble the evidence — the chargeback decision itself belongs to the card networks and the provider.
Every dispute gets a file: order records, delivery or completion confirmation, and correspondence, assembled while the details are fresh and filed inside the provider's window. We will not promise win rates, because nobody honestly can; what we promise is that no dispute is ever lost for lack of paperwork.
Trust
Why it is built this way.
Why are hosted payment rails safer?
Hosted rails are safer because your customer pays on the processor's certified infrastructure, so the most dangerous data never enters your systems — or ours.
There is no card number to steal from a server that never saw one, which keeps your breach surface small and your PCI scope with the processor. The stage-by-stage version is on our how-it-works page.
What happens if Apex Pay and my business part ways?
Your merchant account survives us: the provider agreement is between your business and the payment provider, and it stays yours.
We build around your account — we do not own it — so if we part ways you keep the account, the settlement history, and your records, and we hand over the reconciliation files rather than holding them. That is deliberate: a relationship you are free to leave is one you can trust.
Still have a question?
Ask it. We answer the same way.
Plainly, with who decides what. Tell us how money moves through your business and we will tell you exactly what we would build around it.