Payments-as-a-Service Companies will claim that becoming a registered Payment Facilitator or PayFac is easy and inexpensive. While ISOs, traditional payment processors and even Stripe itself warn against the pain and high costs. The truth is almost always in the middle, but lets simply look at the data.

Mastercard has 248 Registered PayFacs in North America. This number has marginally increased over the last couple of years but the critical take-away is actually in the companies listed. Less than 1/3 of those companies are vertically integrated SaaS platforms. There are less than 100 SaaS Payfacs. Many are holding companies and payment providers looking to support a horizontal payments strategy, not verticalized ones.

https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/business/overview/start-accepting/payment-facilitators.html