Payment Acceptance Cost Optimization

The overall cost of payment acceptance can often be improved through commercial negotiation with your current PSP or acquirer. We identify the arguments that are relevant to your specific situation, whether the issue is an expensive or non-transparent blended rate, a high acquirer margin under IC++ pricing compared with market benchmarks, or additional PSP products and features that you are paying for but do not actually need or use.

We also look at how your business and the payment market have developed since your pricing was last agreed. How much has your payment volume grown? Has your transaction mix changed? Have you become a more valuable client to your PSP or acquirer? We use these factors to strengthen your negotiating position and establish what a competitive rate should look like today.

At the same time, we review external developments that may have changed the underlying economics, for example, changes in interchange or scheme fees, regulatory developments, or increased competition between PSPs and acquirers. This gives us a clear basis for determining where there is room to reduce your overall payment acceptance cost and which arguments are most effective in the negotiation.

Moving to Interchange++ (IC++) gives you transparency over the underlying costs, but transparency does not necessarily mean you are paying the lowest possible interchange. We analyze whether your transactions receive the most favorable interchange treatment for your industry, business model and transaction types, looking at factors such as Merchant Category Code (MCC), card type, card-present/card-not-present and recurring transaction qualification, as well as applicable Visa and Mastercard interchange categories and industry-specific programs. PSPs and acquirers do not always actively optimize these opportunities, as identifying and implementing them can require additional analysis and operational effort. We help identify where your transaction setup and classification could qualify for lower interchange and turn the transparency of IC++ into actual savings.

For international businesses, the countries involved in a card transaction can have a significant impact on its cost. In particular, the relationship between the merchant's location and the card-issuing country can determine whether a transaction is treated as domestic or cross-border under the relevant scheme rules. We analyze these payment flows together with your acquiring setup to identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary cross-border costs, including whether local acquiring or a different acquiring structure could improve the economics. We also analyze the currency conversion chain, looking at how many conversions take place, where they occur, who performs them and at what exchange rate. This can reveal unnecessary conversions or expensive FX spreads, for example where the PSP converts the funds before settlement or where the conversion is performed later by your bank.

Multi-acquiring and payment routing can reduce costs by directing transactions to the PSP or acquirer that offers the best overall economics for each transaction type. We can optimize an existing setup or design and implement a multi-acquiring strategy from scratch, taking into account factors such as country, currency, card type, payment method and transaction value. Where a payment orchestration platform is used, we can configure the routing logic, monitor its performance and continuously refine the setup based on actual cost and authorization data. We also assess whether direct relationships with certain payment methods or schemes could be more economical than accessing them through the main acquirer, and whether selected transactions could be shifted to alternative payment methods or payment rails altogether.

For certain business models, particularly subscriptions, recurring billing and card-on-file payments, the way payment credentials and failed payments are managed can have a direct impact on both payment costs and payment success. Technologies such as Visa Token Service (VTS), Mastercard Digital Enablement Service (MDES), account updater services and network tokenization can generate fees or processing events that may be avoidable or unnecessarily frequent. We review how these services are implemented and charged, as well as how payment retries are configured, to identify unnecessary attempts, fees and processing events. We then help optimize the setup so that legitimate payments can be completed successfully with the fewest necessary processing steps and at the lowest possible cost.

High levels of fraud and chargebacks can result not only in direct losses, but also in additional scheme monitoring and compliance costs. We assess your exposure to programs such as Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) and Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Program (ECP) and Excessive Fraud Merchant (EFM) Program, and help identify the measures needed to reduce the underlying ratios and associated costs. We also review where stronger authentication or other risk controls make economic sense for particular transaction types, balancing fraud prevention against customer friction and conversion. In addition, we look for exceptional or event-based fees in your payment setup and assess whether these can be renegotiated or the underlying events reduced.

Negotiating better pricing only creates value if the agreed terms are actually reflected in your invoices and settlements. We reconcile the fees you are being charged against the pricing you have negotiated, identifying discrepancies such as incorrect pricing configuration at the acquirer or PSP, misapplied fee categories, or issues in the technical setup and transaction processing. This helps uncover pricing leakage that can otherwise remain hidden, and ensures that the savings achieved through negotiation and optimization are actually realized.