I’m not familiar with what exactly that means for a payment processor to function as a “Merchant of Record,” are you talking about a Merchant Identification Number?
It is true I don’t have that with Stripe, only a confusing account number that is a mix of numbers and letters. Other payment processor Elavon gives merchants a 10 digit merchant ID#, which may mean they do act as Merchant of Record but I don’t know what that means.
With the original topic of monetizing access to a group, for that to work really depends on what is the group about or for, with a discourse page that could mean both for subscribing to what another creator is producing as well as the opportunity for people to be able to publish their own material with someone else’s forum.
With the standard tier hosting costing $100 a month, this is more affordable if ten people want to pay $10 a month to have accounts with a hosted forum that would cover the cost.
Other services like google workspace cost $7 a month per user and business e-mail is generally about $13 a month, stripe or another payment platform could be used to collect user fees for that which don’t generate any profit but just cover the cost to run a group communication system.