Does Your Merchant of Record Support Your Capital Needs?

Most Merchant of Record  decisions are made like vendor selections. That’s the mistake.

The MoR decision gets treated as a payment problem. It isn't. It's a capital allocation decision with meaningful downside if you get it wrong - and most studios aren't evaluating it that way.

The CFO's job isn't to find the best vendor. It's to ensure the studio's financial continuity regardless of what any single vendor does.

Three lenses: Cash, Risk, Performance. Everything else is noise.

Cash

Payout timing is capital allocation. Treat it that way.

Every extra day of settlement delay is a loan given to the provider at the studio's own cost of capital. Provider A settles in 7 days. Provider B settles in 30. That's not an operational preference - that's two different cash positions with a calculable cost.

Model payout timing at current and projected revenue. Run the math on Net 7 vs Net 30 at scale. It’s not small.

Then ask: who is liable if payouts are delayed? Does that create a choke point that costs time and opportunity? Slow payouts aren't a feature gap. They're a working capital cost.

Ask yourself this question: How do you model your MoR’s Free Cash Flow in your forecast?

The move most studios miss

Many studios make one critical assumption: they treat MoR as a single-vendor decision.

The best CFOs don't pick an MoR. They build a portfolio.

Running two MoR partners simultaneously isn't complexity - it's risk management. Designate a champion, run a challenger at defined volume. Benchmark across geos, payment methods, store types, subscription versus one-time transaction. 

Then shift allocation based on performance data.

A 3-5% acceptance rate difference in a high-volume region isn't a rounding error. It's real revenue. Additionally if one rail goes down, revenue doesn't stop.

This reframes the entire evaluation. The question isn't which vendor to pick. It's how to build payment infrastructure that performs, adapts, and survives to lower overall studio risk.

Risk

Three exposures. All of them balance sheet questions.

Survivability

You won't know your MoR was fragile until it's too late.

The question isn't "are they good?" It's "can they survive something going wrong - and can you survive them going wrong?"

The real risk isn't collapse, which is rare. It's acquisition, deprioritisation, or a pivot - when revenue continuity becomes someone else's secondary concern. If they lose 10% of their existing clients, are your terms going to be reevaluated? 

Compliance and chargebacks

Signing with an MoR doesn't automatically transfer all liability for store purchases. It depends entirely on whether the contract is airtight and whether the vendor has the infrastructure to absorb it.

A weak MoR doesn't eliminate compliance exposure. It adds a middleman between the studio and the problem. Chargeback policies vary significantly. The wrong vendor introduces contingent liabilities that were assumed to be transferred - the studio ends up holding cash reserves for a risk it believed was already offloaded.

The question to ask directly: are we paying twice for a risk we think we already transferred?

Performance 

Vendor benchmarks are the wrong comparison.

The only number that matters is acceptance rate against a specific player cohort, in specific regions, on specific payment methods. Benchmark against internal data, not a marketing deck.

Geo and payment method variance is where real revenue hides. A poorly optimised webstore isn't a UX problem - it's a missed revenue problem that you never see in a report. Friction at checkout is revenue loss that never shows up in the MoR's performance report.

When a vendor claims 90% acceptance rates, the right question is: what's the real rate for your players?

The infrastructure standard

Cash. Risk. Performance. Every MoR decision maps to one of those. If it doesn't, it's noise.

The studios that get this right don't treat MoR as a vendor selection. They treat it as infrastructure - built for resilience, benchmarked continuously, never dependent on a single point of failure.

Tebex is built for studios that operate that way. Fast, predictable payouts. Tax, fraud, and chargeback exposure moved off the balance sheet. Payment performance benchmarked across markets, not just reported in aggregate. The goal isn't to be visible. If a payments provider is doing its job, a studio shouldn't feel it. What finance should feel is control - over cash, over risk, over the ability to move when the game starts working.

If your MoR failed tomorrow - would your revenue survive it?