Payment Strategy Partners

Every business that handles money pays a stack of fees to do so. Most businesses overpay somewhere.

The market for advice on this is structurally broken:

• ✓ Tier-one consultancies serve only the largest.
• ✓ Specialist boutiques work mainly on the provider side, and
• ✓ Vendor-aligned consultants sell single-vendor solutions.

There is a clear space for an independent, senior, outcome-linked firm that covers the full payments cost stack from the buyer's seat.

That is what PSP exists to be.

We believe advisory work should be commercially accountable, practical and aligned with the client’s interests. Wherever possible, our fees are linked to outcomes rather than open-ended billing. Our advice comes from hands-on experience of payments contracts, products and programmes, not generic consulting frameworks.

We approach every engagement from the buyer’s seat first. We work for the organisations paying for payments, while managing provider relationships openly and transparently. And because the payments cost stack is complicated enough already, we keep our advice, findings and recommendations in plain English, making it clear what matters, why it matters and what to do next.

Based in London, we work with clients across the UK and European markets, bringing senior-level commercial experience directly into every engagement. Our approach is operator-led and deliberately lean, keeping clients close to the people doing the thinking and the work.

We have built the firm around depth, independence and practical experience, rather than layers of traditional consultancy. Explore more about the founder behind Payment Strategy Partners and the principles that shape how we work.

Adam Durrani has spent more than forty years in the international payments market.

His career spans the UK, Europe and Asia, working across wholesale banknotes, foreign exchange, payments and commercial operations.

He has built and led commercial teams in each region, negotiated at every level of the market, and worked with mid-market merchants, multinational corporates, regulated payment institutions and public sector bodies — on both sides of the buyer-provider relationship.

We start with a conversation, at no cost, to establish whether there is likely to be anything worth finding. If there is, we ask for twelve months of statements and contracts and take the cost stack apart line by line.

You then receive a written report setting out what each line costs you today, what it should cost, and what we believe is recoverable. You decide what to do with it. Where you want us to carry on, we handle the renegotiations and the retendering, deal with the providers directly, and stay with the work until the new arrangements are in place and the change is visible in your statements.

We publish a long-form essay each week on the economics and history of payments — how the market is structured, why it works the way it does, what the regulatory and commercial developments of the moment actually mean, and where they fit in the longer history of how value has moved. The essays draw on primary sources, interviews with practitioners, and the commercial experience that comes from working inside the market rather than writing about it from outside.

It is written for people who want to understand the substance, not for people who want a summary of last week's news.