Editorial standards

Sourcing rules for legal and regulatory statements

• Every legal, licensing or regulatory statement must trace to a primary source: a state regulator, a statute, a federal agency such as FinCEN, a banking regulator, or official payment-network documentation.
• Secondary blogs, vendor marketing and forum posts are never used as the basis for a factual claim.
• Source links are published with the publisher name and the date an editor last checked the URL.
• Statements are framed as of the last review date, with an instruction to confirm current rules at the source.

Claims we will not publish

• Guaranteed approval, guaranteed compliance or guaranteed account stability.
• Visa or Mastercard credit acceptance for plant-touching cannabis sales.
• Named banking relationships, sponsor banks or processor partnerships without written permission.
• Approval rates, customer counts, processing volumes, certifications, awards or employee and founder details that have not been verified.
• Reviews, ratings, testimonials, vote counts or engagement statistics that were not produced by real people. Structured data on this site never contains them either.

Hypothetical examples and demonstration content

Some articles use illustrative scenarios to explain how an underwriting decision or a shutdown response actually plays out. These are always labelled as a Hypothetical Scenario, Example Scenario or Illustrative Example in the visible page, and are never presented as a real client.

Case studies created before a verified client story exists carry a visible demonstration label and an internal instruction to replace them with verified information before public representation.

Workflow before anything is published

• Draft, review, approval, scheduling, publication — in that order. Nothing publishes straight from draft.
• AI-assisted drafts are treated as drafts. A human approves before scheduling; the system will not publish without a recorded approver.
• A duplicate-intent check runs first. If an existing page already answers the search intent, the existing page is updated instead of a competing page being created.
• A quality gate rejects thin, keyword-stuffed, unsourced or fabricated content before it reaches a URL.

Scheduled re-review of time-sensitive topics

State, legal, banking, payment-network and pricing content is flagged on publication and re-reviewed on a fixed cadence. Pages are updated in place — the URL stays stable, the last-reviewed date is bumped, and source access dates are refreshed. We do not fork a page into a new dated version.

• Regulatory: reviewed at least every 90 days.
• State-specific: reviewed at least every 90 days.
• Banking: reviewed at least every 120 days.
• Payment network: reviewed at least every 120 days.
• Pricing & fees: reviewed at least every 180 days.
• Standard: reviewed at least every 365 days.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct the page and bump its review date. Material corrections are reflected in the updated date shown on the page.