Online Payments Consulting: Strategize Your Payment

Interchange makes up about 85% of the total cost of card processing for most large merchants.  And there are over 1,000 unique interchange categories. How do you know whether you’re receiving the most favorable interchange rates?

There are many variables that impact the application of a specific interchange rate, such as card type, entry mode, MCC, acceptance environment, transaction amount, and numerous others.  While some of these variables can’t be influenced, many can. We can uncover these cost-saving opportunities and improve your bottom line.

While interchange rates are publicly available, data around acquiring and gateway fees and network incentive agreements is not. This makes negotiation difficult at best. So, you can never be sure whether you have an optimal agreement.

Over our 18+ year history and 700+ engagements, we’ve gathered significant market intelligence about these fees and agreements. We leverage these insights to improve your pricing in the form of reduced rates, upfront incentives, and rebates. We can benchmark approval rates and churn based on data from hundreds of subscriptions merchants across all verticals, billing frequencies, and price points.

Audits of interchange and processor fees are essential to ensure you are paying the lowest possible card processing rates. At Optimized Payments, we provide independent payment processing consulting audits that can help you discover pricing gaps, reveal errors, and deliver cost savings. Our proprietary software easily sifts through millions of records to find gaps and uncover cost-saving opportunities, along with retroactive refunds and credits.

Do you need to create a payments strategy, outline a roadmap to achieve a defined strategy, or simply reach specific payment goals? Most merchants have a wish list of payments issues they want to resolve or new solutions they want to implement to save money and enhance the customer experience.

Whatever your payment needs, we have an experienced payment consultant on staff that can help. With deep industry knowledge and nearly two decades of experience in payments consulting, we’ve undoubtedly helped other merchants with needs just like yours. Let us help you accelerate your implementation timeline, save money by sharing best practices, or help prioritize multiple initiatives by developing informed business cases.

Optimized Payments has the deep industry expertise to avoid these common pitfalls. We’ve managed over 35 merchant services RFPs, many with complex needs like payment terminal acquisition, gateway and security solutions, omni-channel tokenization, vendor consolidation, etc. Our methodical and experienced approach enables us to complete RFP projects within two to four months.

Do you have an optimized least-cost routing strategy, and have you structured optimal incentive agreements with the debit networks? If not, or if you don’t know, we can tell you.

BINs, networks and rates change all the time, and we have data that keeps up with all of those changes; determining how you should tweak your strategy given the latest changes in the debit space.

We’ve worked with some of the largest retailers in the U.S., with the largest processing of over 1 billion debit transactions per year, and we understand all the nuances that can impact card network incentive agreements. In addition, we have sophisticated analytics that can evaluate risks, investigate different transaction routing scenarios, and recommend an optimal solution that delivers the greatest cost savings—sometimes tens of millions annually.