"Business Coaching" Is Now a Flagged Category. Your Payment Processor Just Got the Memo.

Somewhere in the definitions section of a federal court order signed last month sits a short list of the merchants a payment processor now has to look at twice before it will touch their money.

Item three is business opportunities. Item four is "Business Coaching Program." Item five is any product or service with a negative option feature — the legal term for a subscription that keeps billing unless the customer actively stops it.

If you sell a coaching program, or a membership that renews monthly, you are described in that list.

The order comes out of an enforcement action most course creators never heard about. Global payment processor Nuvei agreed to pay $4.85 million to settle FTC charges that it opened and maintained processing accounts for merchants it knew or should have known were engaged in deception, including tech support scams. Nuvei neither admits nor denies the allegations, except for facts needed to establish the court's jurisdiction.

The money isn't the interesting part. The screening regime is.

Why coaching ended up on the same list as debt relief

The complaint wasn't only about tech support. The FTC alleged that Nuvei's U.S. subsidiary also opened and maintained merchant accounts for merchants allegedly selling business opportunities with false or baseless earnings claims, such as DK Automation, and for merchants that other payment processors or acquiring banks had previously terminated for excessive chargebacks or fraud.

That's the lineage. Earnings claims, recurring billing and dispute volume are the three traits regulators associate with the categories that generate the most refund rage — and all three are standard equipment in the online course business.

Law-firm alerts summarizing the order describe the covered-client category as a broad one, capturing outbound telemarketers and merchants in tech support, computer software, business opportunities, business coaching, negative-option, healthcare-related and debt-relief lines, as well as any merchant named in an FTC, federal or state enforcement action in the past decade.

Ten years. One state attorney general action against a company you were once involved with, and you're in the category for a decade.

What the screening actually involves

This is the part worth reading slowly, because it describes someone reading about you.

The order bars Nuvei from processing for any prospective covered client without first conducting a reasonable screening to determine whether that client's business practices are, or are likely to be, deceptive or unfair under Section 5 of the FTC Act or in violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule.

For merchants in the enhanced-screening category, Nuvei must collect information about what the business sells and how it sells it, plus its principals, controlling persons and majority owners — along with business names, trade names, websites and physical locations. The order also calls for five months of chargeback data and, where available, six months of processing statements.

And then the ongoing part. Greenberg Traurig's note on the settlement tells higher-risk clients' processors to consider building the order's specific measures into their own risk-based procedures: reviewing independent online sources, complaint monitoring, test calls, and chargeback-investigation triggers.

Test calls. Somebody may phone your sales line, posing as a buyer, to hear what your closer promises.

Independent online sources means your refund threads, your Trustpilot page, the Reddit post about your launch, the screenshots of your DMs.

An underwriting-side readout of the orders also notes a bar on boarding a covered client whose only address is a UPS or FedEx store, another mailbox or mail-forwarding service, a PO box, a registered agent's office or a virtual office. Every creator running a laptop business out of a mail drop should read that sentence twice.

1% and 75

The monitoring numbers are blunt.

Nuvei must calculate chargeback rates monthly for every client, both by individual processing account and across all of that client's accounts. An investigation is required when a client exceeds a 1% chargeback rate and has more than 75 chargebacks in a month during any two of the previous six months. Once an investigation starts, Nuvei generally has 60 days to stop processing and close the affected accounts — unless it documents clear and convincing evidence that the client's practices are not deceptive or unfair.

Read that backwards from the processor's side. A risk team facing a 60-day clock and a clear-and-convincing standard has an obvious cheaper option: close the account.

The chargeback trigger covers every client, not only covered clients, and there's an ACH version too — a total return rate above 2.5% with more than 40 returns. The order also flags something plenty of creators pay for: using chargeback-prevention services to lower a merchant's rate without working out why the disputes are happening in the first place.

One caveat that matters. The thresholds are specific to this order. They are not a new industrywide FTC chargeback standard.

Why it reaches past one company

Nuvei wasn't alone. In September 2026 the FTC settled with Nuvei for $4.85 million and with Humboldt Merchant Services for $12 million over merchants they boarded. Humboldt's covered-client definition is even closer to home for a new creator: a merchant that processes only e-commerce transactions and either uses a negative option feature, such as a free trial or auto-renewal, has no prior card processing history, or was formed within a year of applying.

A free trial, a brand-new LLC, no processing history. That is the founding configuration of roughly every membership launched this year.

The agency explained its reasoning plainly. "Payment processors are crucial intermediaries between businesses and consumers that must take their role seriously and operate in good faith to screen out bad actors," Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador said in a joint statement, adding that if processors don't take fraud prevention seriously, "the Commission will move swiftly to compel them to do so." Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the action "underscores the Commission's commitment to ensuring that our payments system operates free of fraud."

The practical translation for anyone selling knowledge on a recurring plan: the regulator you have to satisfy is no longer only the regulator. It's an underwriter with a spreadsheet, a complaint feed and a phone.