Signage for Peptide Therapy treatments on glass, Lafayette, California, May 8, 2026. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
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"An off-rail transaction is basically closed loop, which doesn't touch Visa and Mastercard," Mark Lewis said. He was describing how a fast-growing slice of America's peptide business now moves its money: around the card networks, not through them. Lewis is president of specialty payments at Lüt, a Fort Lauderdale firm. He says it clears more than a billion dollars a month for merchants selling peptides, the injectable compounds behind the GLP-1 weight-loss boom and a wave of muscle-repair and anti-aging stacks.
"Stability. Everything is about stability in this right now," Lewis said. Peptides are an almost entirely cash-pay drug economy, and Visa, Mastercard and Stripe would rather not service it. The operators who do are rebuilding the plumbing themselves.
Kevin Miller has watched that demand stack up. He runs a Los Angeles marketing agency and built a free peptide-tracking app, and says about a thousand people a day now open it to log their doses. One compound runs away with his data, and it is not even approved: retatrutide, Eli Lilly's triple-agonist weight-loss successor, still in trials with a filing not expected before the end of 2026. "By far the biggest one. Not even close," Miller said. "This entire economy runs entirely outside of insurance. This is where a lot of American consumer discretionary income is going right now."
'Immediately shut down'
"All it takes is one chargeback," he said. Run a single $50,000 sale under the wrong merchant category code, or let one customer dispute a charge, and the penalties cascade. "Those fines range from anywhere from 10,000 to $500,000 and above," Lewis said, and a processor can freeze a merchant's reserves on the way out. Health claims are the other trip wire. He pointed to a product literally named Grow that promised to regrow hair in ten days. "Mastercard comes on and sees that, or the FDA sees that, you are immediately shut down, all your processing accounts," he said.
"We start everybody on ACH," Lewis said. New merchants run on closed-loop bank transfers that never touch the card networks for 30 to 90 days before any card processing switches on. Reserves are low by high-risk standards, he said, 7.5%, with holds set under the rules of NACHA, the body that governs U.S. bank transfers.
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Lewis said Lüt is affiliated through common ownership with the privately held bank where the funds are deposited. Great North Bank is a Wisconsin-chartered bank and a wholly owned subsidiary of Multi-Bank Services, Inc.; it is not owned by Lüt. Lüt's own July announcement names a different partner, First Federal Bank of Florida, a community lender with roughly $4 billion in assets. The settlement workaround is real. The ownership claim around it is not yet verifiable.
'The same framework as the cannabis industry'
"We only board referral accounts right now from the APA," Lewis said. Lüt takes merchants almost entirely on referral from the American Peptide Association, a body run out of the Florida Healthcare Law Firm in Delray Beach, where attorney Jeff Cohen is a principal. The two announced a partnership in May. A legal opinion letter from the association's counsel becomes the ticket to a payment account, and Lüt scans merchant websites for the claims that get accounts killed. The model that sank a generation of cannabis businesses, sell now and worry about the rules later, is the one Lewis watches for. "The peptides industry is following the same framework as the cannabis industry," he said.
Operators in adjacent industries describe the same gatekeeping from the other side of the desk. "There are certain types of business that we don't touch, like gambling or adult and that kind of stuff," Sami Start, co-founder of crypto on-ramp Transak, said on the On The Margin podcast. Raj Kamal, who runs cross-border payments firm TransFi, treats the compliance machinery as the product itself, claiming "one of the most sophisticated compliance engines in our sector" on the same show. When your customers can't get banked anywhere else, the back-office cost becomes the moat.
'Physician use only'
The ground is shifting, and not in the operators' favor. The FDA spent 2025 forcing compounding pharmacies to stop making copycat GLP-1s once the official shortages ended, and it has logged hundreds of adverse-event reports for the compounded versions. In early 2026, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. eased compounding access for about a dozen peptides. An FDA advisory committee meets July 23 and 24 to weigh two of the most popular muscle-and-recovery compounds, BPC-157 and TB-500. Lewis expects the market to tilt toward prescription-only, clinic-based sales, "an explosion," in his words, in physician-supervised peptides. The industry even has a label for that model, "physician use only," though it is a marketing term, not an FDA category.
'The Plaid of this industry'
Miller's read on the business is financial, not medical, and his pitch borrows straight from fintech. "We're trying to build like the Plaid of this industry," he said. "We're just like the connective tissue." Even he won't risk a mainstream processor. "I could use Stripe, but I'm afraid of using Stripe because I think that I could get shut down at any given moment," he said, so he applied to a third-party processor instead.
His safety pitch doubles as the industry's biggest liability. Most raw peptide material is made in China, and U.S. imports roughly doubled to more than $300 million in the first three quarters of last year. "A lot of people are still getting their peptides from China, and that is incredibly dangerous," Miller said. "It's a major, major threat to American public health." His app, free where rivals charge, is built to steer users toward domestic suppliers. "Our app is completely free. Everyone else's app is paywalled," he said.
"Anybody doing 503A and 503B product compounding, those are the ones that are gonna blow up," Lewis said, pointing retail investors toward the licensed pharmacies that turn imported powder into finished doses rather than toward Lilly. One Boca Raton compounder he named as a major client drew a damning FDA inspection last July, after regulators flagged contaminated lots and the illegal repackaging of retatrutide. Not everyone building parallel rails believes the workaround lasts. "Everyone's taking the easy way out," Neo, the chief executive of onchain neobank UR, said on the On The Margin podcast, describing firms that bolt a card onto a stopgap and call it a bank. "Structurally, at its core, nothing's really changing." For the peptide industry's payment stack, the test comes when the FDA's advisers sit down to weigh in on its bestselling compounds in late July.