What to Gather After a Stripe Freeze Before You Request an Assessment

After a freeze, the useful hour is the one spent collecting the record, not the one spent ringing people who promise a replacement account. An assessment can only judge what it can see. What it needs to see is dull, specific and already in your possession if you were the one running the business.

The pack

1. The notice. Date, the exact words on capabilities, the deadline, the documents requested, whether it is a request, a restriction, disabled charges or a closure. Save the email and the banner.
2. The account identity. Legal name, country, website, statement descriptor, and whether this is a standard account or a connected account on someone else’s platform.
3. The people. Directors and owners, and whether they have changed since the account was opened.
4. The product, in one paragraph a customer would recognise, plus the real fulfilment time. Not the aspiration. The time you are hitting this month.
5. The book. A rough monthly charge volume, average ticket, refund picture, dispute count if you know it, and the period you processed. Ranges are acceptable. Inventions are not.
6. The balance position as you understand it: available, reserved, in transit, negative, unknown. Label unknown rather than writing zero.
7. Prior processors and prior restrictions, including refusals at application. Who, when, and the reason you were given.
8. What you want now. Answering Stripe, finding a different processor in your own name, or asking whether a partnership could be explored. Say which. Do not say “just get us live”.

Leave these out

• Full card numbers, CVCs, customer card photographs.
• Stripe passwords, recovery codes, restricted API keys, webhook secrets.
• A newly built website that exists only to look calmer than the real shop.
• A draft that omits a product line because it is harder to explain.
• Anyone’s bank login.

How an assessment uses the pack

The first question is whether the seller, the product and the history can be described without hiding the restriction. If they cannot, there is no second question. If they can, the next question is whether any partnership could even be put in front of a processor later, given that product, that fulfilment lag and that history. RevRouters does not claim that a processor will say yes. The pack is what stops us pretending the question is simpler than it is.

Partners reading the other side of this should ask for the same pack before they discuss a percentage. A merchant who will not show the notice is asking you to underwrite a story. You are allowed to stop at the missing notice.