Termination letters arrive without warning and read like verdicts. They are not. A termination ends the relationship; it does not end your entitlement to your settlement balance, your reserve, or an honest accounting. What it does start is a clock — because the evidence that proves your claim is sitting behind a portal login that is about to stop working.
This is the checklist. It is deliberately concrete. Do the day 0–7 items this week, in order, even if you intend to do nothing else.
Days 0–7: secure the record
1. Export every statement and settlement file — today.
Portal access after termination is a courtesy, not a right, and it is routinely revoked within days or weeks. Before anything else, download:
- all account statements, for the full life of the account;
- all settlement files and transaction exports, in the most granular format the portal offers;
- the running reserve balance and its history;
- every chargeback record, with the scheme reason codes;
- any fee or deduction reports the portal can produce.
Save them somewhere the counterparty cannot reach. Do not assume you can come back for the rest later. If the portal limits export ranges, work backwards from today until you have everything. This is the single most important item on this list: every later step depends on the documentary record you secure this week.
2. Secure the contract — all of it.
The services agreement is the obvious part. The file also needs the schedules, the fee annexes, the operating rules incorporated by reference, every amendment, and any side letter or email that varied the terms — pricing concessions, reserve adjustments, settlement timing. If onboarding happened years ago and the paperwork is scattered, reconstruct it now, while the people who handled it are still at your company.
3. Put every verbal statement in writing.
If anyone at the counterparty has told you anything material on a call — why the account was terminated, when the reserve will be released, what the deductions are for — send a same-day email confirming it: "To confirm our call today, you stated that…". They may reply, correct, or ignore it. All three outcomes improve your file. From this point onwards, conduct the relationship in writing only.
4. Note the dates.
The termination date, the date of the termination notice, the contractual notice period, and the reserve release dates the contract produces from the termination date. Put them in one document. These dates are the spine of the file.
5. Tell your own people.
Brief whoever handles your finance inbox and your registered office: correspondence from the counterparty, a scheme, or later an administrator must reach one named owner — unopened deadlines are how claims die quietly. If the account was connected to other services — gateway, terminals, a lending product — list those relationships now, because offboarding one of them sometimes triggers terms in another.
Days 8–30: build the claim
6. Send a written request for a full accounting.
One letter or email, businesslike and specific, asking the counterparty to state: your final settlement balance; the reserve balance and its contractual release date; an itemised list of every deduction, fine and fee applied in the last twelve months, with the basis for each; and where scheme recoveries for your transactions have been credited. Cite the clauses. Ask for a response in writing within a stated, reasonable period.
You are doing two things with this letter. You are gathering information — and you are creating the document that, months from now, shows exactly when the counterparty was asked and what it chose to answer. Both matter. Keep the tone flat: requests read better than accusations in every forum that may eventually see them.
7. Keep the dispute off the telephone.
After termination, the counterparty's calls have a purpose: things said by telephone are deniable, and concessions extracted by telephone are durable. Decline politely, in writing: "We are happy to deal with this by email so both sides have a record." If a call is genuinely unavoidable, follow item 3 — confirm everything in a same-day email.
8. Log every deduction.
Build a simple ledger from your exports: date, amount, the label the counterparty gave it, the contract clause that supposedly authorises it, and whether you have ever seen underlying documentation. Most merchants who do this exercise find entries they cannot match to any clause. That ledger — not your sense of grievance — is what a quantum gets built from.
9. Reconcile what never arrived.
The hardest losses to see are absences: scheme recoveries won but never passed through, chargeback reversals that do not appear on any statement. Compare your chargeback records against the credits actually received. You may not be able to complete this reconciliation yourself — the counterparty holds half the data — but flagging the gaps now defines what to demand later.
What not to do
Three mistakes do more damage in week one than the counterparty manages in a year. All three share a cause: the merchant treats the termination as the emergency, when the real emergency is the record. The termination has already happened; the file is still yours to protect.
Do not sign release documents in panic. Offboarding packs sometimes include a document — a "settlement letter", a "closure confirmation", a "mutual release" — whose effect is to waive your claims in exchange for whatever is being paid out. Read anything you are asked to sign on the assumption that it contains a waiver, because it often does. A release signed in week one is the cheapest claim the counterparty will ever buy.
Be careful with "goodwill" partial payments. A partial payout is welcome; the conditions attached to it may not be. Before accepting, check — in writing — whether anything is being treated as conditional on the payment being final. Accepting money is rarely the problem; accepting it in full and final settlement is.
Do not vent in the correspondence. Every email you send may eventually be read by an administrator, a regulator or a court. Angry correspondence does not strengthen a file; it gives the counterparty quotes. Flat, specific and dated wins.
Scoring your file
If you want to know where you stand after the first month: our viability checklist turns the items above into a score — the same dimensions we assess in a fit review. The short version: a file with the contract, the full statement exports, dated written requests and a deduction ledger is a strong file, whatever the counterparty's tone suggests.
If you were terminated recently
The window for items 1–5 is measured in days, not months — and time limits on the claim itself apply and vary by jurisdiction, so assess early. Once the record is secured, let us look at it: submit a fit check — five minutes, eight fields, no upfront cost, an initial view within five business days.
This article is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.