Most teams evaluate a merchant of record the way they'd evaluate a payment provider: API quality, coverage, price. Understandable, and it misses the point. Swapping PSPs changes a vendor. Adopting an MoR changes who the seller is, and that ripples through contracts, tax, accounting, support and data in ways worth understanding before you sign, not after.
Start with the customer relationship. Under an MoR, your customer in-market buys from the MoR: its name on the contract of sale, the invoice, the statement. Your terms of service step back to govern the product itself. Your brand still fronts the experience, but the legal seller changes, and your legal team should read the MoR's consumer terms as carefully as they read your own, because those terms now sit between you and your customers.
Then the money. Instead of thousands of consumer receipts across markets and currencies, you invoice the MoR and receive consolidated settlement in your chosen currency. Operationally that's a gift: one counterparty, one receivable, clean reconciliation. It also raises a presentation question your finance team should settle early, namely how revenue is recognised and presented under the reseller structure. I'm a chartered accountant and my answer is still: put it to your auditors at the start, with the actual contract in hand, not at year-end.
Tax is the quiet giant. The in-market VAT obligations that were yours as a foreign seller become the MoR's, because the MoR is the taxpayer. If you'd already registered in some markets, unwinding those registrations cleanly is its own small project. If you hadn't registered where you should have, the MoR conversation is often the first time someone maps that exposure honestly. Better now than during diligence.
Support splits along the seller line. Billing questions, refund requests, "what is this charge": those route to the MoR, and they should, since the MoR is the name on the statement. Product questions stay with you. Getting that routing crisp, in both directions, is one of those unglamorous details that decides whether the first ninety days feel smooth or shambolic.
Risk moves too. Chargebacks, payment fraud losses and the disputes process sit on the MoR's book, along with the scheme monitoring exposure that comes with them. In exchange, expect a serious MoR to underwrite you properly at onboarding and to hold reserves. If it doesn't, worry, because an MoR that underwrites nobody is carrying risks it hasn't priced, and one day those risks will interrupt everyone's settlement, including yours.
What you keep is important: the product, the brand, the customer relationship, your analytics, your roadmap. A good MoR arrangement should also let you keep your billing engine if it's genuinely core to you, with the MoR executing charges under mandate, rather than forcing a rip-and-replace of subscription logic you've spent years refining. Ask about that option explicitly.
And since you're diligencing them while they diligence you, four questions that separate real MoRs from marketing: Who holds the local merchant IDs? Whose name is on the local tax filings? Where does customer money sit between collection and settlement, and under what protections? And what happens if you leave: what's portable, what isn't, and is that written down?
The honest summary is that a foreign SaaS selling into Africa was always carrying seller obligations, it was just carrying them badly and invisibly. The MoR shift is those obligations becoming visible, priced and professionally carried. Companies that go in understanding that make the transition in a quarter and never look back.