Every business that makes or receives payments pays a stack of charges to do so. Card acceptance is one layer: interchange, scheme fees, acquirer margin, gateway charges, terminal costs and the FX spread on anything taken in another currency. Cash is another: collection, counting, insurance and deposit charges. Cross-border payments carry spreads that are rarely benchmarked. Operational banking — account fees, faster payment charges, CHAPS — accumulates in the background. And the interest foregone on operating cash balances that sit in current accounts earning little or nothing is a loss that never appears on any statement; it simply goes uncollected.
Most of these costs were negotiated or set at different times by different people. The total is rarely visible as a single number, and no provider has an interest in showing you the full picture. The result is that businesses routinely carry costs well above what the market warrants, sometimes for years, without anything to indicate that something is wrong.
We take the statements apart line by line — card acceptance, cash handling, banking charges, foreign exchange — and price each component against what comparable businesses are paying today. Where a line has drifted from the market, we renegotiate or retender it.
The review covers:
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.
You then receive a written report setting out what each line costs you today, what it should cost, and what we believe is recoverable. A review typically turns up between two and six lines worth acting on. We put a figure against each one, agree with you which are worth pursuing and in what order, and then handle the renegotiations and provider migrations needed to capture them.
Some lines can be resolved by a phone call to the incumbent. Others need a full retender and a migration plan. We tell you which is which before you commit to anything.
Interchange, scheme fees, acquirer margin, gateway, terminal estate, tokenisation
Smart-safe deployment, CIT contract terms, cash-centre banking, change-order operations
Correspondent banking, spreads, routing, multi-currency BIN economics
Deposit pricing, sweep arrangements, payment-rail selection
Sponsor banking, BIN sponsorship, agency banking arrangements
Any business with meaningful payment or cash volumes — from a single-site retailer to a national chain, a public body or a housing association. In practice our work pays for itself from around £500,000 of card turnover upwards, which is where the recoverable amounts become large enough to be worth the effort on both sides.
The first conversation takes half an hour, costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If there is nothing here for you, we will say so.
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