From the passing of the Farm Bill in December 2018 to the rise and fall of Elavon merchant processing and the subsequent rise of large corporate CBD–Solvent has directly witnessed the hopelessness felt by thousands of CBD/Hemp businesses in the wake of the uncertainty.
“Without access to traditional financial services, such as checking accounts and credit, many hemp businesses have been unable to effectively expand beyond their basic business operations.”
— Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
It’s time that all changed.
Introducing Ventus
Ventus is the first-ever compliant CBD payment program for both card-present (in-store) and card-not-present (e-commerce) transactions. Ventus leverages underwriting and transaction monitoring technology to provide real-time fraud detection on behalf of our banking partners, mitigating the risk placed on those institutions. Banks and Credit Unions now have transactional insights including customer identification, product verification, payment method, geographic data, and more–ultimately empowering financial institutions to reduce fraud along their own rails. With Solvent’s payment solution, Ventus, CBD, and Hemp businesses now have access to legitimate and reliable payment processing. Ventus will allow them to grow sustainably, without the constant fear of the future.
Getting Started
So logistically speaking, how does Ventus work? Our merchant portal is seamless and very user-friendly, which as a result, expedites the onboarding and underwriting process while keeping compliance paramount. For in-store merchants, our card-present solution is offered in partnership with Vend HQ, but not required. If you’re happy with your current PoS, you can keep it.
Costs & Fees
From our research, the current standard is 5% + .30, with off-shore and domestic solutions requiring a minimum volume of $50,000-$150,000 per month to apply. At Solvent, we understand that success rarely happens overnight, and with CBD/Hemp being new legal industries, businesses need time to grow to that kind of volume. Solvent base level rates start at 4%+.20 (with the option to go lower based on volume), and no minimum monthly revenue requirements. By creating compliance enabled payment processing solution, it allows us to offer industry-leading rates for all types of CBD businesses, small-medium-large, and even new CBD businesses!
What About Banking
Banking has been equally as elusive to cannabis businesses as payment processing. For those merchants seeking legitimate banking, Solvent’s got you covered. Behind Ventus sits our banking compliance technology, Terra; a comprehensive fraud and compliance platform that gives financial institutions visible insights into their customer’s day-to-day. The side effect of this kind of transparency is not only reliable bank accounts for CBD & cannabis-related businesses. But a full suite of banking services usually only reserved for low-risk businesses. Available services include wires/ACH transfers, checks, loans/credit lines, and of course compliant payment processing.
Legal businesses want affordable banking and payments–with Terra and Ventus they can have both. By providing transparency to banking, banks can now offer incredible value to merchants while protecting themselves in the case of a compliance audit. So we guess you can say that with Solvent, everyone wins.
We are now “open for business” supporting the legal hemp & CBD industry. If you would like to learn more about Solvent’s solutions, please email: Brian@solvent.io
To learn how we got here, read about the three problems that motivated us to build a solution!
