Nobody wants to process porn payments. Or, at least, not the big guys. The “potential risk exposure,” is too high, writes Stripe in its FAQ for merchant customers. “Limitations” from the card brands, among others, make it impossible, explains Square.Processing payments for the adult content industry is a dirty business in more than one sense. With chargeback rates that commonly reach as high as 5%, it’s seven times riskier than processing sales of retail items like clothing and electronics. Then there’s the potential legal liabilities (What if the content involves minors?) and the regulatory hurdles, including an underwriting process that can be 15 times longer than for regular merchants. Despite the difficult operating environment there are a large number of small and mid-sized “high-risk” payment processors specializing in facilitating transactions for the merchants of guns, tobacco - and adult content. The draw is the chance to earn fees as high as 10% per transaction versus about 2.9% for the typical purchase facilitated by Stripe. Payment processors coordinate communication between merchants, banks and a customer’s credit card to complete an online transaction. High-risk processors in the adult content industry go above and beyond and act as “merchant of record.” This means their name appears on customers’ credit card statements instead of businesses like Pornhub or OnlyFans (a marriage-saver), and they assume liability for every aspect of the transaction, including chargebacks and regulatory compliance. Forbes estimates that these little known companies specializing in adult content process no less than $100 billion per year globally. With an estimated $68 million in fee revenues, Florida-based Segpay is one of the bigger companies specializing in payments for adult content websites. Founded in 2005 by industry veteran Cathy Beardsley, Segpay (short for “segregated payments”), was the first to keep website funds separate from the processors operating funds to address what was then a common fear in the adult industry: losing everything when a processor went bankrupt. “Our slogan was ‘’you get paid before we do,’” says Beardsley. Before founding her own firm, Beardsley witnessed unscrupulous processors commingling funds, using the money in merchant accounts to pay bills or make investments. Ensuring merchant clients that their funds would not be touched until they were dispensed, Segpay was able to quickly grow its roster of adult content sites. Segpay’s technology is now widely used by mainstream payments processors.The largest independent processor of porn payments, Phoenix, AZ-based CCbill (Pornhub, by far the largest website, handles its payments in-house) earns an estimated $200 million a year in processing fees. Last October, CCBill and California-based Epoch, were sued by three Jane Does for processing payments for GirlsDoPorn, an adult site whose founder Michael Pratt is currently serving a 27-year jail sentence for sex trafficking. Both processors, which did not respond to Forbes’ requests for comment, have filed motions to dismiss denying knowledge of wrongdoing, but the case remains under litigation.Risks like litigation is one reason why most banks won't touch these fintechs with a ten foot pole. So few banks are willing to work with these processors, that they have been forced to come up with workarounds. Processors like Segpay have spearheaded the creation of networks of shared banking relationships. In these “revshare” agreements, larger processors handle the transaction volume through their channels, and the referring smaller processor, which lacks the capital for vetting and compliance, receives a percentage of the revenue. Since getting too large would likely attract unwanted attention, it allows the bigger players to expand their reach and revenues and it diversifies risk, while at the same time helping out smaller players. “It's sort of key to work with people,” says Beardsley who, today, processes close to $1 billion per year for adult merchants worldwide. Segpay currently works with Utah’s Merrick Bank ($9.3 bil assets) and New York-based Esquire Bank ($2.3 bil assets).Cindy Gallop, founder of “educational adult” site Make Love Not Porn has experienced banking struggles first hand. Last year, she was de-banked three times in two months. The first time, Gallop was traveling when the notice arrived by snail mail, and she was left with less than 24 hours to withdraw the company’s full balance with nowhere to deposit the funds. “They never tell you why. They just go and close your account with immediate effect," she says.Banking relationships aren’t the only trouble spot for the processors of pornography payments. Even signing up merchants is an arduous process.“They have to send us like a book,” says Allen Kopelman, CEO of Nationwide Payment Systems, of his adult industry applicants. Requirements include proof of content moderation, age verification, data security, legal attestations, and guardrails against non-consensual content, revenge porn, trafficking, and other prohibited materials, severely limiting the speed with which firms like Kopelman’s can onboard merchants. “There quite literally is not an industry that is more regulated than this one,” adds Kyle Hall, who is the CEO and founder of Pay Kings. In 2025, Pay Kings processed $2.4 billion worth of transactions in high-risk industries, with about $363 million or 15% coming from the adult vertical, according to Hall, far less than this sector was bringing in before the pandemic, when it was Pay King’s biggest vertical by a landslide. Back then, Hall used to charge adult merchants 9% per transaction, but increased regulation stemming from Visa’s 2020 crackdown on PornHub, when it was found to be hosting illicit content, raised the barrier to entry so much that the entire industry shrunk. The players who are left have much more sway over processors, driving down fees, he explains. Hall now charges about 3.5% - barely more than he would get from transactions in low-risk verticals. “It doesn't really make sense anymore,” he laments. FORBESOperating a payment processor for adult content has its significant hurdles but even successful processors can run into trouble when they finally seek an exit.In 2016, Shawn Silver founded Payment Cloud to close the gap in the payment processing market around high-risk merchants, including in the adult industry. But, as he turned his sights on selling, Silver found that investors “didn't want to be associated with adult. “We didn't want that business to be more than 1 or 2% of our book,” he says, “It was hurting us on a reputation standpoint.” It was the right move. In 2024, Payment Cloud was sold to Kurv, a Cleveland-based general payments giant servicing 30,000 clients.For all of the difficulties associated with being a fintech in the world of porno, the rewards typically come because fewer competitors mean higher fees. “This business can be very profitable if done properly,” says Beardsley. In 2025, Segpay, whose business is almost entirely in the adult space, grew 10%, according to Beardsley. The firm has been profitable since its third year in business back in 2008, and Forbes estimates its net margins to be roughly 5% versus 0.5% for payment processors working in more traditional fields. Some enterprising payment processors in the adult content business have turned to using crypto to broker transactions. Estonia-based NOWPayments accepts over 350 forms of crypto, including stablecoins like USDC, undercutting traditional processors by offering adult merchants a flat fee of 0.5% and “instant onboarding.” While the firm offers direct crypto transactions, their biggest innovation was allowing users to pay with a credit card while still maintaining the benefits of crypto, including deposits that hit the merchant’s account in under a minute, avoiding the delays and freezing risks of traditional processors. To pay by credit card, users simply enter their card details before verifying their identity through a quick online process. NOWPayments then converts the dollars to crypto before depositing the funds in the merchant’s digital wallet, explains CEO Kate Lifshits.The industry’s biggest merchant, PornHub parent Aylo, has embraced crypto. After getting the axe from the credit card industry, the site began accepting crypto, currently offering over 25 currencies. (It also offers bank-to-bank ACH payments through its in-house processing branch, Aylo Billing Limited, with transactions appearing under the pseudonym “WTSeTicket.”)Crypto is changing the adult payment processing business as is artificial intelligence. The industry is giddy over the revenue and higher margin prospects of AI-generated pornography.“We get asked about it all the time. People come to us with AI porn sites,” says Nationwide’s Kopelman. The challenge is monetizing that interest in a banking system that has yet to decide how to treat AI content. “It’s something our [banks] won't take. There's really no way to control the content,” adds Beardsley.