HIGH-RISK BY ASSOCIATION
Unfortunately, because the cannabis space is regarded as high-risk by the banks and card brands, businesses that don't even touch the plant are being dropped by their payment processors--whether they're processing with an aggregator like Stripe or PayPal, or they have their own merchant account.
This is occurring because processors are running algorithms that crawl clients' digital storefronts for compliance issues. To you, words like "cannabis" or "marijuana" or "THC" are industry terms and marketing jargon. To those algorithms, they're red flags. And when the red flags get tripped, processing stops.