Cherry Financing for Vets: 5 Marketing Claims Put to the Test

What Veterinary Practices Should Know About Cherry Financing

Cherry has become an increasingly visible financing option in veterinary medicine. Its appeal is easy to understand: fast applications, soft credit checks, high advertised approval rates, 0% APR options, upfront payment to the practice, and low advertised merchant fees.

Those features are valuable to a veterinary practice. But practices should understand exactly what the marketing claims mean before deciding how Cherry fits into their financial-care strategy.

Marketing naturally emphasizes a product’s strongest features and most favorable outcomes. But it’s important to know how that product functions under conditions specific to your practice, including your clients’ needs and the financial priorities that matter most to you.

Our VetBilling client support team regularly talks with veterinary practices that use Cherry or are considering it, so we thought it was essential for us to better understand how Cherry works. We thoroughly reviewed Cherry’s veterinary marketing, provider materials, consumer disclosures, and merchant agreement. We found several notable inconsistencies between Cherry’s marketing claims and how its financing actually works.

We’ll review five Cherry marketing claims and compare them with the details in Cherry’s own disclosures and merchant agreement. The goal here is transparency: to help veterinary teams understand what is behind the marketing language, what questions to ask during a demo, and what to clarify before signing a service agreement.

1. Up to 90% approval rates
   
2. Merchant fees starting at 1.7%
   
3. More than 80% of practices offer Cherry first, even when other financing options are available
   
4. No default risk to the veterinary practice
   
5. The practice gets paid 100% upfront

1. Cherry prominently advertises approval rates of up to 90%.

That sounds great, right? But consider that statistic carefully: Cherry’s own disclosures specify that the 90% approval rate applies only to its “Pay-in-4” loans. It does not publish a 90% approval rate for its other financing options. Those options are subject to Cherry’s proprietary underwriting algorithm, which evaluates borrowers based on factors that can include financial history, credit score, monthly income, and monthly expenses.

The Pay-in-4 option associated with that 90% approval claim consists of four interest-free payments every two weeks. For example, a $3,000 veterinary bill would require $750 at checkout, followed by three more $750 payments every two weeks over the next six weeks.

A client may be approved for that offer and still be unable to afford those payments in such a short repayment window. They might need 12+ months to have an affordable monthly payment. Being counted as approved for Pay-in-4 does not guarantee that the same client will also qualify for the longer-term financing they might truly need.

So when evaluating an advertised approval rate, a useful question is:

You say you get up to 90% approvals – but does that apply to all types of financing you offer? If not, what approval rates can we expect to see for other types of financing?

Keep in mind, too, that approval is not the same as acceptance. A client can count toward Cherry’s approval rate even if they ultimately decline the offer because the terms are unaffordable. An approval and a financing offer don’t automatically mean care can move forward.

2. Cherry advertises merchant fees starting at 1.7%. Is that what my practice will really pay?

Cherry advertises merchant fees starting at 1.7%, but that isn’t necessarily the merchant fee your practice will pay.

Cherry’s own materials indicate that the merchant fee varies based on the practice’s pricing preference — in other words, the merchant fee the practice is comfortable paying — and the financing options it wants to make available.

The important point here is that you have to consider the trade-offs.

If keeping the merchant fee as low as possible is your priority, ask what approval rates and financing terms you can expect at that cost.

If your priority is higher approval rates or longer repayment periods for clients, ask what merchant fee applies to the pricing level that supports those goals.

With consumer credit financing that uses tiered pricing, as Cherry does, a lower merchant fee can mean fewer approvals and less flexible financing offers for clients. Paying a higher merchant fee may give you access to broader approval reach and a wider variety of repayment terms and interest-rate options.

The most important question is:

What merchant fee will our practice actually pay for the approval rates and financing terms we believe will be most helpful to our clients in making care affordable?

3. Cherry says more than 80% of practices offer it first. Does that mean practices prefer it over every other financing option?

Cherry states that more than 80% of practices offer Cherry first, even when it is available alongside competitors.

But that should not automatically be read as evidence that more than 80% of practices prefer Cherry to other options.

Why? Because Cherry’s merchant agreement requires offering Cherry first.

In the financing industry, this arrangement is called “first look.” First look means leading with one financing provider rather than presenting several financing options at once and allowing the client to choose.

Cherry’s merchant agreement requires participating practices to offer Cherry first whenever financing is discussed. The practice must also feature Cherry prominently inside the practice and list Cherry first among financing providers on the practice’s website and marketing materials.

The agreement does not mandate exclusivity; practices can still offer other financing options. But Cherry must receive first-look status. In practical terms, that relegates the practice’s other financing options to “second-look” status: Cherry is presented first, and other options come afterward only if Cherry does not work for the client.

Importantly, Cherry has sole discretion under the merchant agreement to determine whether a practice has used Cherry as second-look financing in violation of those requirements. If Cherry makes that determination, it can increase the practice’s merchant fee through what it calls a “Risk Adjustment.”

But here’s the problem: what if your client already has a CareCredit account and wants to use it? Or another client has used a different financing provider they like and wants to use it again? How do you handle that? Because this is likely to happen, it’s important to know whether you can negotiate this part of your agreement with Cherry without risking a higher merchant fee.

The bottom line is simple: when you work with Cherry, its merchant agreement tells you how Cherry expects to be positioned relative to your other financing options. You have to decide whether you are comfortable with that.

4. Cherry says the practice has no default risk. Are there ever any exceptions?

A major benefit of third-party financing is transferring default risk. If a client simply stops making payments on a Cherry loan, repayment and collection are not the veterinary practice’s responsibility — they’re Cherry’s problem.

But Cherry’s merchant agreement also contains specific chargeback and refund provisions. If a transaction qualifies for a chargeback or refund, Cherry can claw back money from your practice through offsets against future funding, ACH debits, or a demand for repayment.

So the distinction is straightforward:

If the client simply stops making payments on the loan, that is not the practice’s default risk. But if the client disputes the transaction and it falls under Cherry’s chargeback provisions, Cherry can require the practice to return money it has already received. At that point, your practice is responsible for recovering that money from the client if you don’t want to take the loss.

5. Cherry says practices are “paid 100% upfront.” Is that always the case?

Cherry’s veterinary marketing says practices get paid 100% upfront. Its veterinary FAQ and merchant agreement clarify that the practice receives the transaction amount minus the merchant fee.

That is customary with third-party financing, but it is not the same as getting paid 100% of the amount charged on the invoice.

If a $5,000 treatment is financed through Cherry, the practice is paid upfront, but it nets $5,000 minus the applicable merchant fee.

In a demo with Cherry, be sure to nail down the merchant fee(s) your practice will actually pay so you know exactly what you will net.

Questions to take into a Cherry demo

A good financing demo should help you understand not only what is possible under optimal conditions, but what your practice is likely to experience given your client demographics, your risk tolerance, the merchant fee you are comfortable paying, what your clients need, and your priorities around access to care and financing.

Some useful questions might include:

• What approval rates should our practice realistically expect at the different merchant-fee pricing levels available to us?
  
  
• What determines whether a client receives 0% APR or a higher APR, how much they are approved for, and what repayment periods they are offered?
  
  
• What does making Cherry our preferred financing provider mean in practice? If a client already has CareCredit and wants to use it, what does the agreement require us to do?
  
  
• Under what circumstances do you apply a Risk Adjustment because you determine a practice has not presented Cherry first, and how often does that happen? Is this negotiable?
  
  
• If one of our clients disputes a Cherry-financed transaction or initiates a chargeback, what happens to the money already paid to our practice? Are we responsible for paying it back to Cherry?
  
  

After you’ve asked Cherry these questions, ask yourself and your team another one: Does this structure fit the way our practice wants to approach access to care, client choice, flexibility, and financial conversations?

Marketing tells you what’s optimal. Due diligence tells you what you’re actually buying.

Fast applications, soft credit checks, upfront payment, 0% APR options, and the transfer of default risk are all important to a veterinary practice’s financial health.

Spend some time thinking about what matters most to your practice, and how you prefer to balance competing priorities.

• Is it immediate cash flow?
  
• Maximum approval rates?
  
• The lowest possible merchant fee?
  
• Longer repayment periods or lower APRs for clients?
  
• Client flexibility and choice?
  
• Do you want one preferred financing provider, or do you want clients to be able to choose among several options from the outset?
  

These are not minor details. They help determine what the financing program will cost your practice, what your clients are likely to be offered, and whether the model aligns with your practice’s values and ethos around access to care.

A company’s marketing is designed to focus attention on what is optimal. Transparency means understanding the details well enough to know what you are actually getting, even under circumstances that are not optimal.

You are not buying the marketing. You are buying the financing product.

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