PEP Episode 101 — 2026 Reality Check: The Truth About “Junk Fees” in Payments & CBD Peptides MATCH News

  • March 10, 2026

Episode Description

Ever had a $100 ticket morph into $260 at checkout and wondered who is skimming the difference? In this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, Global Legal Law Firm’s Managing Partner James Huber sits down with Allen Kopelman (Nationwide Payment Systems & B2B Vault podcast host) to bring two decades of operator experience to the table. Together, they take a candid tour through modern payments—where policy experiments, junk fees, and AI-driven fraud collide with daily underwriting realities.

The discussion tackles why capping credit card fees rarely delivers promised savings to merchants. Drawing on lessons from Europe and Australia, the hosts demonstrate how tight fee caps shrink credit access, gut rewards, and push consumers toward Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) alternatives that carry higher merchant processing costs. Moving into the fraud war, they reveal how generative AI is forging near-perfect synthetic merchant applications—complete with hijacked business profiles and fake IDs—and why hybrid human-and-machine underwriting is required to keep acquiring banks safe. Finally, they cover high-risk compliance shifts surrounding CBD Certificates of Analysis (COAs), LegitScript certification for peptide merchants, and the process of MATCH list remediation.

Key Discussion Points

  • The Reality of “Junk Fees”: Why processing fees persist and where true consumer and merchant choice breaks down.

  • Credit Card Fee Caps & The Credit Card Competition Act: Why routing mandates and artificial price caps often backfire by inflating BNPL reliance and shifting fraud risks onto acquirers and merchants.

  • The AI Fraud Arms Race: How generative AI is used to forge merchant applications and business documents, and how AI detection tools are evolving to catch them.

  • Return to Manual Risk Control: Why fully automated onboarding is dangerous for high-risk merchants and why human-in-the-loop review is returning.

  • CBD, Hemp & COA Compliance: Stricter reviews for product labels, Certificates of Analysis (COAs), and mainstream retail risk.

  • Peptides & MATCH List Exits: Navigating LegitScript certification for peptide sellers and the grind of clearing a MATCH listing.

  • Cannabis & Pay-By-Bank: Assessing alternative payment mechanisms and OCC regulatory pressures on banking cannabis processing.

 

Practical Takeaways for Acquirers & Merchants

  • Adopt Hybrid Underwriting: Blend automated machine learning detection with manual human expert review to catch sophisticated synthetic merchant applications.

  • Audit BNPL True Costs: Compare your effective rates on Buy Now Pay Later transactions against standard credit card processing before encouraging BNPL at checkout.

  • Verify Product Documentation: High-risk merchants in CBD, hemp, or peptide spaces must ensure strict alignment between product labels, lab COAs, and website SKUs to avoid sudden account termination or MATCH listing.

 

Featured Speakers

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Legal Disclaimer

Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.

Transcript

Alan Kopelman (00:00):

It also irks me how much money every time I buy a concert ticket from Ticketmaster. I’m like, oh, the ticket was a hundred bucks. And then by the time I’m checking out the door, I’m checking out for like 250, 260. I’m like, where did that come from? 60 bucks of taxes and ticket master fees and a venue fee

James Huber (00:19):

And all these fees. You said it, free market should drive it. And with Ticketmaster, you don’t have a choice. They’re the only ones selling tickets when you’re going to your Adam Sandler show. You got to see the Sandman.

Alan Kopelman (00:34):

Yeah,

James Huber (00:34):

Exactly.

Alan Kopelman (00:35):

I had to go see Sandman. He’s my man, the Sandman.

James Huber (00:39):

You got to

Alan Kopelman (00:40):

See Rob Schneider last week. Loved it. He was awesome.

James Huber (00:44):

But yeah, in most places you have a choice. Our firm does a surcharge on our fees and they’re going, “Just send us an ACH then.” And they’re going, “No, I want the points.” And I’m going, “Okay, well, there you go.

Jeremy Stock (01:00):

” Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. We’re really excited. We got a remote podcast. Joining us in studio, we have managing partner of global legal law firm, James Huber, as well as our special guest joining us remotely. Alan Kopelman of Nationwide Payment Systems, also the famous B2B Vault podcast. Alan, it’s always a pleasure having you on the podcast. Welcome.

Alan Kopelman (01:39):

Well, thank you guys for having me again. I think it’s just my third or fourth time on.

Jeremy Stock (01:45):

It sure is. I

James Huber (01:46):

Know we got to get you a jacket. So I know every single one of our listeners is a loyal listener, so they already know you are, but for the people that are just coming on for the first time, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself, Alan? What’s your brief story? 10,000 feet. How’d you end up here today?

Alan Kopelman (02:09):

So started Nationwide Payment Systems in 2001. So we’re 25 years into the payments space. So I have a lot of experience in the payments business, low risk, high risk. I used to be a chef. I was in the hotel business. I owned a restaurant. So I actually was a merchant. So I understood the pain of merchants, and that was part of the reason for getting into the business and wanting to provide merchants with really good service, explain to them how credit card processing works, be helpful when they have problems and do the right thing. That’s what I say.

James Huber (02:51):

Love it.

Alan Kopelman (02:51):

And that’s what we’re all about. And I started my podcast about three years ago, B2B Vault. One big accomplishment has been in the last couple months, we’re in the top 100 on Apple Podcasts for entrepreneurship, which is exciting that we’re actually in the top 100 on Apple Podcasts. So I’m happy about that. That’s impressive. 2026. Yeah, thank you.

Jeremy Stock (03:18):

Yeah,

James Huber (03:18):

Congrats.What’s our rank, Jeremy?

Jeremy Stock (03:20):

That makes me very curious. James, I’ll have to find out after this podcast now. I do not know.

James Huber (03:26):

We’re coming for you, Alan. Actually, your podcast is quite different than ours. So even though it’s payments related. But yeah, I mean, when we started this podcast because you guys were kind of just kicking off around that … Well, you weren’t just kicking. I think you had like 50, 60, 100 episodes under your belt or something already. But the only other one out there was, I think James Shepherd’s. And that one was good, but it didn’t go into the stuff that we like to talk about, which is what we do, which is kicking ass and shaking up the payments industry and changing things up and helping our clients out. But there’s just not a lot of content out there. And I’ve noticed top 100, that’s great. Jeremy’s checking our rank right now. We’re hoping that we’re above that. But when I go around now to the trade shows, I’m no longer the biggest, baddest fucking payments attorney out there.

James Huber (04:29):

I’m now the guy from the podcast.

Alan Kopelman (04:33):

Well, that’s how people know me when I go. I’m walking through the room, they’re like, “Hey, that’s the guy. That’s the podcast guy.” Whenever I’m at a payment show. And

James Huber (04:43):

We

Alan Kopelman (04:43):

Tried to gear … In the beginning, our podcast was about payments. Now it’s more about entrepreneurship. So we do touch on payments, but we do talk more about business, things that concern business owners and try to bring on guests that are experts in different areas of what you need to deal with as a business owner and not just solely be focused on payments.

Jeremy Stock (05:07):

I’m hoping, Alan, that James will become known as the badass podcast host as

James Huber (05:11):

It took about that. Well, that was my thing. Yeah. When I would go around, I would have people like, “Oh yeah, great. There you are. ” And then I have people running the other way because they’re going, “Ah, don’t get near that guy.” But now no one’s scared anymore.

Alan Kopelman (05:25):

Well, that’s good. When you’re podcasting, people can see your friendly personality, your demeanor, and they get to know you by watching your videos and they go, “This person, you want to come off as approachable.” And that’s what’s important to be

James Huber (05:41):

Approachable. For me, no, I want my bulldog personality to come across that is a bit of an act, but it’s our effective act and litigation of, yeah, we’re coming to cut you down. I get that

Alan Kopelman (05:53):

Part, but you don’t want to scare customers away.

James Huber (05:56):

A little. I want them a little. I want them coming in a little timid. But anyways, enough about us. What we wanted to talk about today is we’re, what, three, four weeks into 2026. It sounds like we’re not going into a World War III as of this morning, but we’ll see it’s anybody’s game. So it sounds like everyone’s calmed down a little bit and maybe now we can talk about what’s coming in payments in 2026. I don’t really want to talk about the credit card cap that’s coming because that’s not coming, the credit card cap fee. I think the new CCA bill maybe we can talk a little bit about. I mean, we can touch on either one of those if you want to just go, “Yeah, this one’s

Alan Kopelman (06:43):

Going to happen.” Yeah, the CCA bill. I mean, when I look at that, and you had a guest on your show recently, Victoria, and she’s in the EU, and I just interviewed her for an upcoming episode. And one of the things we talked about was when they put these caps on in Europe and they put these caps on over in Australia, what came out of that was everybody got to start paying more with debit. It’s really hard to get credit cards. And then what happened was you end up with buy now, pay later, and buy now, pay later costs merchants a lot more money than credit card processing.

James Huber (07:21):

Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely.

Alan Kopelman (07:23):

And buy now, pay later. Every time I see an announcement, it upsets me like, “Oh, people can buy now, pay later groceries.” Klarna announced the other day, “Buy now, pay later for rent.” I’m like, “Rent? What do you mean buy now, pay later for rent? You’re going to be paying for your rent for five years after you moved out of your apartment.” It’s just messed up. I mean, who’s governing what they’re allowed to do? The other thing I was telling Jeremy earlier, I said there was two heated discussions going on yesterday, continuing in today, one on Facebook in a merchant sales rep group about cash discount and merchants getting fined and all that and merchants getting upset. And then there was someone on LinkedIn and was a merchant complaining about how they got getting hit with a thousand dollar fine because they’re not compliant with their cash discount.

Alan Kopelman (08:25):

And it’s just crazy. And the merchant, his argument was, “Well, Ticketmaster charges a fee, airlines charge you a fee, you buy a movie ticket, there’s a fee, you pay your taxes, there’s a fee. There’s all these fees. Everybody’s feeing people charging fees, but then when it comes to the small business owners, they’re the ones getting beat up.”

James Huber (08:51):

Yep. I mean, that’s been my biggest problem with surcharging is they’re going, “Oh, protect the consumers, the cardholder, to protect the businesses.” So yeah, I mean, that’s my big problem. But yeah, I mean, the cap on credit card rates, literally nobody wants that. I mean, I’d be great for my credit cards because yeah, I’ll just run a balance a little longer or whatever. But yeah, the problem is, like the Durban Amendment is the rewards cards will all go away. The banks won’t give people credit cards. It’s not going to work. It’s going to have the total opposite effect. And I was on a call with ETA who they’ve got their ears to the track, Scott Talbot saying he’s going, “I give this less than 10% chance. And the only reason it has 10% is when people are trying to get reelected, all reason goes out the door.”

Alan Kopelman (09:44):

Right. That’s true.

James Huber (09:45):

And then for the Credit Card Competition Act, he kind of said the same thing because this is worse than the first one because it makes no sense. We’re going to bring in a third party to be on these things. Mine is going, if you bring in some third party, they don’t have the security and they don’t have the technology that Visa and MasterCard have. I mean, they’re so big, we’re basically reliant on them that we can’t really get away from them. In theory, yeah, it’s great. Take these guys down a peg, but not at everyone’s expense.

Alan Kopelman (10:24):

But Durbin’s been around since 2010, so 16 years in, no one has stepped up to say, “Oh, we’re going to be the third party network.” So 16 years, if nobody’s done it, what makes you think someone’s going to do it now?

James Huber (10:39):

Exactly. I mean, I guess technology has progressed, but yeah, nobody has the wherewithal to do that. When

Alan Kopelman (10:47):

We talk about technology, one of the things that keeps coming up is AI, right?

James Huber (10:54):

Right.

Alan Kopelman (10:54):

So AI comes up and someone asked me, they said, “What are you doing with AI?” I said, “Right now, AI is giving me the biggest headache I’ve ever had in my life because we get the best fake applications from

James Huber (11:09):

Merchants.” Interesting. And

Alan Kopelman (11:10):

I’ll tell you, they were so good that two of them actually went through, the bank approved them and

Jeremy Stock (11:21):

Then

Alan Kopelman (11:22):

All of a sudden we saw something hinky with the transactions and we shut the merchants down. This one merchant literally took over somebody’s Google My Business page, had a fake website, had a spot on driver’s license, bank letter, everything, boom, and got approved. And now we’re checking everything that comes in. Yesterday we had one and the guy’s driver’s license, we put it in ChatGPT. They said it was fake. Then we went further than we usually do, looked up the business license and the business had no business license and whatever. We can’t board these people. We can’t even move forward. But the amount of fraud, if you’re automatically boarding people, you’re not going to be able to spot all that.

James Huber (12:19):

I think it’s interesting you said AI is your worst enemy, but you’re using AI to combat AI. Yeah,

Alan Kopelman (12:25):

But they’re using- The

James Huber (12:26):

Machines are fighting each other. Really?

Alan Kopelman (12:28):

Yeah. Well, you can’t go on ChatGPT and upload your driver’s license and go, “Okay, change my name from James Hubert to Alan Gopelman.” It won’t do it. It won’t do stuff like that. It’s unethical. Just

James Huber (12:40):

Tried.

Alan Kopelman (12:40):

He’s tried. I know you

James Huber (12:41):

Clearly.

Alan Kopelman (12:42):

I did try to do it. And also, they don’t save any PDFs that you upload anymore. So you can’t upload a PDF and then go back and want to work on it again. Once you close the window out, they delete the PDF. But there must be using Chinese AI or something from outside the US that make these fake documents because there’s just tons of fake documents out there

James Huber (13:09):

And

Alan Kopelman (13:11):

It’s going to be hard on the credit card processors. I mean, probably Stripe, Square, and PayPal, and those guys, they’re just going to get ripped a new one with this kind of stuff.

James Huber (13:24):

That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought of that, that the war that they can put to get past, because we see it all the time in our line of work of these big blowout accounts and we’re going after the affiliate or the marketer or whoever who put them all together. But yeah, they got a war chest now. So yeah, I could see that being a huge issue, like you said, for those big acquirers, but then yeah, for the guys your size and bigger and smaller, yeah, better be on the lookout because you’re going to have to have a human looking at this certainly because the AI can trick AI. It can trick itself probably even easier than a human, I would think.

Alan Kopelman (14:10):

Yeah. And I think we’re going to see also this year, I think we’re going to see a lot more scrutiny on the businesses who sell regulated or in unregulated type of business situations, high risk niche type of businesses, you’re going to see a lot more scrutiny from the underwriters on these businesses. And so-

James Huber (14:31):

Why do you think that?

Alan Kopelman (14:34):

Because we’re already seeing it now where banks are like, “Okay, you have a new merchant selling CBD. If they have more than 50 products, we don’t want to even want to look at the website.”

James Huber (14:44):

Wow.

Alan Kopelman (14:44):

Things like that. They don’t want to look at it. They don’t want to take the time to go through all the COAs. You guys had somebody on your podcast, Noah Fitzgerald. I had him on my podcast, incredible. I wish them the best of luck. Hopefully they can get some kind of blessing from Visa so that there can be some compliance forced upon these merchants by the ISOs to make sure these people have credible products on their site because it’s just getting really hard to get merchants approved, neutral merchants, even somebody selling a food product or things like that because they want to check all the labels now on everything. And that’s also an AI thing because how can they manipulate the labels or manipulate a PDF document with AI?

James Huber (15:34):

I’ve always thought that with the COAs. I’m going, this is a scanned PDF going, “Oh, look, the THC is lower.” How do you validate that that just didn’t-

Alan Kopelman (15:46):

They contact the labs. They literally, some ISOs, it takes forever to get these people approved because they’re calling, they see the lab name on there, they’re calling the lab. “Hey, we want to verify you sold this CBD to James Huber CBD company, blah, blah, blah. “And they’re verifying it by hand. And that’s why they’re like, ” Oh, we can’t take anybody with more than 50 products. We’re not going to deal

James Huber (16:10):

With it. “But why the … Well, I won’t say a shift. It’s always been difficult, but you’re saying it’s going to get harder. It seems like … I don’t know. What’s the explanation? Why is it getting harder?

Alan Kopelman (16:25):

Because they don’t want to spend the time with the human capital to verify all these COAs or all these products that are up on somebody’s website. They don’t want to spend the time doing that anymore. And then the account does very little business and is not super profitable and they’re worried about it. So they ask for a lot more documentation. They want to know where this stuff is made. It’s the same thing, like peptides. It’s impossible to get that … You can’t get that approved by anybody unless they’re doing some kind of black hat thing. And unless it’s a pill product, those are getting approved, but not the liquid. Nobody wants any injectables because when GLP-1 came out and those were injectables, that was next to impossible to get approved until finally LegitScripts started certifying those merchants and

James Huber (17:22):

Even

Alan Kopelman (17:22):

Testosterone merchants too, until they started to get certified by LegitScript. And then they became,” Okay, well, we can let people sell this now online. “And that became a thing. Peptides is going to have to go through the same pain that all those companies went through.

James Huber (17:42):

We actually had somebody on our podcast that can place peptide merchants. So I was gone when it went live and all of a sudden I’m going, ” Why are all these people texting me about peptides? “And I emailed Jeremy and they’re like, ” Oh, we saw the podcast. Can they place our merchants? Can they place our merchants? “And they’re actually getting a bunch of them up and live. So send them on over. Yeah.

Alan Kopelman (18:13):

That’s interesting because I don’t know what bank is taking those, but it’s unregulated. So we’ll see what happens with that business. And obviously the pharma companies like Eli going after some of these peptide companies because they’re selling semiglutide or tirzepatide compounded peptides.

James Huber (18:42):

Yeah. My thing, well, we’ve had tremendous … They all got matched. We’ve had tremendous luck. I mean, I think we’re almost 100% getting people off of peptides. Is that right?

Jeremy Stock (18:55):

With a certain bank, we’re getting up pretty much

James Huber (18:58):

Every- Every single one of them off of Match, which is a great start to go get your processing. But the people that we’ve sent over, some of them are on match and we’re going, ” Hey, we’re working on it. “And they’ve got them live and they’re out there helping people stay skinny.

Alan Kopelman (19:17):

Well, that’s good. Somebody’s helping them. As long

James Huber (19:22):

As the

Alan Kopelman (19:22):

Banks keeps it up.

James Huber (19:25):

Yeah. I mean, that’s what’s interesting because I don’t know which bank it is either, but I’ll see banks. We’ve got a case right now where the bank, I’ve got agreements, cannabis processing, ACH cannabis for your cannabis merchants, blah, blah, blah. They get popped by the OCC and they’re going, ” We didn’t know this was … What were you guys doing to us? “And I’m going, ” This is 100% of what we were doing. “So yeah, is that coming for these peptide merchants where the banks just don’t really get it? I don’t know, because I think this bank was sitting there going, ” Oh, if it’s state legal, yeah, we’ll just do it. It’s fine. It’s a preemption issue. “They’re going, ” No, you guys forgot who you’re regulated by.

Alan Kopelman (20:13):

“Right. Yeah. There’s quite a few companies that have contacted me recently doing pay by bank for cannabis businesses, and they’re trying to get into other industries too, and it’s all pay by bank. And they say they’re using state banks to settle the transactions and they can only work in certain states. So that’s going to be interesting for us to start looking into after we get through January and close out 2025.

James Huber (20:45):

Yeah. When I saw that product come, I thought, oh, great. But then I thought about the people going … I guess I had a client who was all excited. I’ve got ACH. All you have to do is you go in and you click some buttons, but then the problem was is people don’t want to use it because they don’t want to go log into their bank account at a drug dealer’s house. So it’s like, oh, here, I go over to the guy’s house and he’s got his lava lamps and stuff and he’s like, ” Yeah, here, just use my laptop and log into your bank and just send me the money. “Yeah, I guess that’s the problem. Maybe they’re just paranoid. I don’t know why. Yeah. So I mean, that seems to be a challenge there. But yeah, what do you think is going to happen with cannabis processing?

Alan Kopelman (21:41):

Cannabis? Yeah.

James Huber (21:43):

I have no

Alan Kopelman (21:43):

Idea. It’s all up in the air. I know Trump changed some stuff around, but Congress has to do something. I mean, at some point in time, they got to turn on the credit cards for that. The government’s missing probably a ton of income from taxing all the money being made in cannabis. So at some point they’ve got to do something with cannabis. Yeah,

James Huber (22:06):

They’ve got to do something. I mean, hemp is now this criminal thing. What do you think is going to happen with hemp? Are they going to work a deal out for those guys?

Alan Kopelman (22:14):

I hope so because I mean, I wrote an article about it and on the low side, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of businesses that are selling hemp and CBD products and retail stores. I mean, today you look at where can you buy CBD everywhere, grocery store, drug stores, the corner store, every single smoke shop, bars all over the place. It’s everywhere. I mean, you’re just going to rip this whole product out. And then also all the CBD drinks that are out there. And even some of the alcohol companies started making CBD beverages. Some of the beer companies started making their own CBD beverages.

James Huber (23:00):

Yep. So beer and CBD.

Alan Kopelman (23:03):

Yeah. Well, they’re not beer and CBD. They just have CBD and it was like some kind of lemon flavor, kind of like those wine spritzers. Well,

James Huber (23:13):

Yeah. I mean, you go to the grocery store here and there’s CBD everything. So yeah, I mean, it’s going to be a challenge. Well, Alan, thanks for coming in or virtually coming in. It’s always a pleasure. And we’ll hopefully see you soon and get you your fifth timer jacket.

Alan Kopelman (23:31):

All right. Well, hopefully you guys come to the SEA. We can get together at the SEA.

James Huber (23:38):

Yeah, we are coming to that one. Yep.

Alan Kopelman (23:40):

Oh, maybe we should do a breakout session together.

James Huber (23:42):

There we go. Let’s go.

Jeremy Stock (23:44):

Sounds great. Hey, Alan, how can people watching right now find NPS1? Should you send them over to nationwidepaymentsystems.com or where do you want them to go?

Alan Kopelman (23:54):

They can go to nationwidepaymentsystems.com. You can also Google up get NPS1. It’ll take you to our site also, and you can find me on LinkedIn, Alan Kopelman on LinkedIn, and you can follow the podcast wherever you listen to podcast, B2Bault, and listen to our discussions about business, entrepreneurship, payments, and all types of things that affect business owners.

James Huber (24:18):

Yep. And you can find you trolling the Facebook group chats too.

Alan Kopelman (24:25):

Yeah. Once in a while I get

James Huber (24:26):

In there. I love seeing you in there.

Jeremy Stock (24:27):

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at globallegallawfirm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions that do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.

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