Payment shutdown risk for a licensed cannabis business comes down to one question: does your current method touch the card networks? Cannabis has no merchant category code, so any card-based workaround is miscoded, and miscoded accounts are eventually closed with funds commonly held for around 90 days.
1. How do you take non-cash payment today?
Pick the one that carries the most volume.
2. Has a processor ever closed your account or held your funds?
3. Roughly how much revenue would you want moving through non-cash payment each month?
A rough band is enough. This only divides by the weeks in a month.
4. Which of these do you need to take money for?
Select every one that applies.
Estimates based only on what you selected. This is not a quote, a compliance opinion, or legal advice. Nothing here was recorded.
Why the card networks are the whole story
Card networks classify every merchant with a merchant category code. Cannabis does not have one, so a dispensary running card payments is coded as something else. That is not a paperwork problem you can fix with better documentation — it is a missing field with no correct value. The workarounds built around it, cashless ATM and PIN debit among them, inherit the same flaw, which is why the pattern repeats across vendors.
Bank-to-bank ACH sits outside that system entirely. Money moves between bank accounts on federally regulated banking rails, the same infrastructure carrying payroll and rent. No card network is part of the transaction, so no merchant category code applies to it. That does not change federal law on cannabis, and no payment method does. The narrower and accurate claim is that card network classification rules have nothing to attach to.
If you want the longer version, start with the MCC gap, or read what actually happens during a shutdown.