Frequently asked questions

EcomStream renegotiates PSP costs, runs payment RFPs and manages payment performance for retailers and brands, on merchant mandate. The aim is to beat the benchmark, on pricing and on performance, because market level is the average of well and poorly negotiated contracts. EcomStream establishes what you pay your PSP and how your authorisation rate and routing perform against the benchmark, and then negotiates, within your current contract or through a payment RFP, for rates below the benchmark and performance above it. Every engagement is handled personally, from first analysis to final result.

Not all of that is project work. Where cost and performance need to stay under review rather than be corrected once, Managed Performance Optimisation keeps them there, month after month.

A benchmark, or a comparison with peers, shows whether your terms are at market level. Market level is the average of well and poorly negotiated contracts. EcomStream's aim is to beat the benchmark, on PSP costs and on payment performance, and to fix that for the term of the contract. Every tenth of a point below the market then grows with your volume, as does every point of authorisation rate above it.

Four, each answering a different commercial question.

Cut your PSP costs. A project engagement that establishes what you actually pay across interchange, scheme fees and acquirer markup, sets it against the benchmark, and negotiates for rates below it within the contract you already have. Your integration stays where it is.

Run a payment RFP. A structured RFP covering requirements, shortlisting, Q&A sessions and contract negotiation. The route to take when you are replatforming, entering new markets, or when the incumbent will only move under genuine competitive pressure.

Get more from your PSP, delivered as Managed Performance Optimisation. An ongoing arrangement keeping authorisation rates, routing, decline reasons and cost per transaction under review month after month, so payment performance stays a managed line rather than an annual surprise.

Interim work. Senior payment capability inside your team for a defined period, to cover a gap, lead a migration, or hold the line through a period of significant change.

The two project engagements run on a no cure no pay basis. Managed Performance Optimisation runs on a monthly fee, interim on a day rate. All four are delivered personally by Ramon Helwegen.

Some payment consultants maintain commercial relationships with PSPs and acquirers alongside their merchant work. That is a structural conflict of interest, and it shapes the outcome of a negotiation or a selection whether or not it is made explicit. EcomStream is independent: no PSP mandates, no acquirer partnerships, no referral commissions and no revenue share with providers.

Cost reduction on its own is often only part of the picture. Authorisation rates, routing logic and 3DS configuration are reviewed where relevant, because a merchant who has reduced PSP costs but is still leaving conversion on the table has solved half the problem.

No. EcomStream works with retailers and brands across a wide range of sizes. The starting point is a minimum annual payment volume of around 10 to 15 million euros processed through a PSP, because that is where the commercial leverage exists to negotiate material improvements. You would expect larger merchants to have negotiated better deals, but often they have not. That gap tends to be where EcomStream finds the most significant upside. If you are unsure whether your volumes qualify, thirty minutes on a Teams call will make that clear.

Being live with a PSP is exactly the right moment to optimise. The contract terms you signed at onboarding were based on projected volumes and a negotiating position that has likely changed significantly since. Most merchants renegotiate for the first time only when their contract is up for renewal, which means they overpay for years before that point. There is no requirement to wait for a renewal window to open a commercial conversation with your PSP. Most merchants are surprised by what an independent review uncovers, both in terms of the savings available and the commercial mechanics. These are things a PSP will never proactively share.

More than most merchants expect. A remaining term binds the relationship, not the price. Rates sit in a pricing schedule that can be amended without reopening the agreement, restarting the term or touching your integration, and a provider asked with a benchmark position behind the request has more to protect in your volume than it holds in its margin. Part of the work is not a negotiation at all: whether interchange and scheme fees are genuinely billed as pass-through is a question of fact, answered by a forensic audit at fee line level, and your contract term has no bearing on the answer.

Switching is always possible. Where a minimum commitment sits in the contract it is often worth far less than a move produces, which makes it a reason to put the renegotiation to your current provider first rather than a reason to stay put. Where an agreement renews tacitly the date that matters is the notice date rather than the end date, and a credible alternative takes months to prepare. Every month spent waiting is charged at the old rate, and on mid-market volumes those months add up to money that does not come back.

A good relationship with your PSP is not the same as a fair deal. PSPs are commercially sophisticated organisations that maintain warm relationships while quietly optimising their own margin at your expense. The account manager who answers your calls promptly is not the person setting your pricing. When rates are questioned, PSPs are well practised at providing arguments for why the current pricing is justified, keeping the conversation away from a genuine renegotiation. EcomStream uncovers what the relationship obscures. The aim of an engagement is commercial terms below the benchmark, in place of the terms your PSP set at onboarding and has had no reason to revisit since. The relationship continues. It just operates on equal footing for the first time.

Yes. Many merchants prefer to keep the relationship with their PSP one to one, and a cost engagement can run that way from start to finish. In silent partner mode the provider deals only with your team. EcomStream runs the negotiation behind it: the analysis of your invoices and contract, the target terms per fee line, every message to the provider ready to send, a brief before each call, every counter-proposal valued in euros on EBITDA, and the review of the final contract text.

This does not move the workload to your side. The work that takes time, reading the contract, modelling the fees and building the case, stays with EcomStream. Your team sends what has been written, joins the calls it has been briefed for and takes the decision.

An internal review shows you where the money goes, and that is worth having. Two things it does not reach. The first is the pass-through layer: a forensic audit of what was actually billed, line by line, against what each transaction qualified for. Mis-qualifications run for years and nobody inside the business is placed to spot them. On the negotiated side the trap is different: the figure you open with becomes the ceiling, and once you have opened, what is still recoverable afterwards is a fraction of what was there.

What is negotiable sits in the commercial layer of your agreement, and it runs wider and more varied than most merchants assume. None of it is published anywhere. A round opened on an estimate tends to end in a small reduction tied to a longer term and additional business commitments, after which the rate counts as recently reviewed for two or three years and the difference stays unclaimed. EcomStream negotiates on your mandate, corrects the contract terms around the rate at the same time, and is paid out of what reaches your settlement. The same holds for authorisation rate, where nothing outside your own transaction data shows which declines were recoverable.

EcomStream adds the comparison with the market and the negotiation. AI reads your contract and, with an invoice, tells you what you pay. Whether that is good only shows against a benchmark, because the rates and terms of comparable merchants are not published. Market level is the average of well and poorly negotiated contracts, and EcomStream's aim is to beat the benchmark, on PSP costs and on payment performance. EcomStream checks at fee line level what was passed through, negotiates on your mandate for rates below the benchmark and performance above it, and your team sees in that negotiation where the pressure points lie. Without a benchmark you negotiate on an estimate: the provider will not go below what you ask for, and after the round your contract counts as reviewed for two or three years.

No. A PSP reporting on its own authorisation performance is not a neutral source. The metrics they share are typically presented without market context, without a breakdown by payment method, and without visibility into how routing decisions are affecting outcomes. EcomStream sets authorisation rates against market data and reviews the PSP's routing logic, retry strategy and 3DS configuration independently, aiming for an authorisation rate above the benchmark. In most cases there is room for improvement that the PSP has no commercial incentive to surface.

What is found once can be found again. Authorisation performance is not a fixed number, so where it matters commercially the review runs continuously under Managed Performance Optimisation rather than as a single snapshot.

The starting point is always a forensic review of current invoicing against the contract. PSP invoices are deliberately complex. Scheme fee markups, interchange classifications, pricing tiers that should have been applied automatically, these are structural issues that compound over time. EcomStream sets current rates against the benchmark, identifies every optimisation lever and builds the commercial case for a renegotiation aimed at rates below it.

The engagement carries no financial and no operational risk. There is no fixed cost: the fee comes out of the saving, and without a saving there is no fee. There is no switch: the renegotiation runs within your current PSP contract, so integration, checkout and settlement stay as they are.

On an interchange++ contract there is an add-on inside the same engagement: pass-through cost verification. Interchange and scheme fees are reconciled at fee line level against the officially published rates and against what the PSP actually charged. It adds nothing to the fee, no cure no pay still applies to the engagement as a whole, and the only thing it asks of you is more data.

Yes. A payment RFP is one of EcomStream's core services. This covers defining the requirements, shortlisting PSPs, managing Q&A sessions, negotiating the contract, and supporting the final selection. A well-structured RFP also creates the opportunity to address new market developments with strategic impact, new business models, market expansion, regulatory change, ensuring the merchant is fit for what comes next. At the end of the process, either a new PSP takes over the contract, or the existing one has been held to a significantly higher standard to keep it.

The tender runs in its own selection room, a private workspace in your branding, with your requirements and your criteria. Your team and every invited provider work in it, so the tender lives there instead of in six inboxes. EcomStream runs that room itself. Providers never see each other, and none of them sees your cost base, your incumbent, your weighting or your non-negotiables. No other outside party has access to your commercial data and nothing goes to an AI model. When the award is questioned later, the tender file answers.

Managed Performance Optimisation keeps payment performance under review month after month, rather than correcting it once. It starts with a diagnostic sprint: authorisation performance read by payment method, market, issuer and device, decline and soft decline analysis against benchmark, SCA exemption and 3DS configuration reviewed, and retry and routing logic tested against your actual issuer mix.

After that the reading continues. EcomStream acts on what your provider has left undone, tracks your notice periods, auto-renewals and the scheme fee bulletins that move your cost base, holds the service levels in your contract against what the provider actually delivers, and runs the quarterly review on your mandate. A fixed fee per month, and no fee on anything else. Rates, interchange and the commercial terms around them belong to the cost service.

Interim engagements are typically for merchants who need senior payment expertise in-house for a defined period, either to cover a gap in the team, to manage a specific project such as a PSP migration or market expansion, or to provide oversight during a period of significant payment change. Ramon Helwegen takes on the role directly, embedded in the client's operation for the duration of the engagement. Scope and duration are agreed upfront.

When the assignment ends, the reading can continue. Managed Performance Optimisation keeps the same eyes on your payment performance at a fraction of the days.

Fees follow the service. Cutting your PSP costs and running a payment RFP are project engagements on a no cure no pay basis, charged against the savings realised.

Managed Performance Optimisation runs on a monthly fee. It is separate from the success fee of a project engagement, which ends on the agreed date whether Managed Performance Optimisation runs or not.

Interim assignments run on a day rate, agreed before the assignment starts.

The large majority of the saving goes to you from day one, and your share grows step by step over the success fee period until the full saving is yours. The success fee paid to EcomStream is always degressive, over a period fixed at the start of the engagement that ends by itself, with no notice period and no renewal. After that the saving is entirely yours, including the years in which the new PSP contract is still running.

On mid-market volumes a cost engagement is regularly worth a six-figure sum a year, straight onto EBITDA. Where performance is also in scope, authorisation rate improvements can have a revenue impact that exceeds the cost saving itself. Results vary by contract, volume, and PSP, which is why the engagement starts with your own invoices rather than a promise.

Cost and performance behave differently over time. A renegotiated rate holds on its own. An authorisation rate does not. It moves with cardmix, issuer behaviour, 3DS configuration and routing changes your PSP has no obligation to tell you about. That is why performance is worth keeping under review rather than fixing once, which is what Managed Performance Optimisation is for.

It depends on the service. In each case the work sits with EcomStream, not with your team.

Cut your PSP costs. Recent PSP invoices and the current contract including pricing schedules. Where the pass-through cost verification is added, the fee line exports as well.

Run a payment RFP. One data pull on the current set-up, plus the people with a stake in the outcome. EcomStream drafts the requirements from that and collects input from every stakeholder, so finance, technology, operations and customer service each get their say. No one is left behind: every stakeholder enters their input to the requirements directly, in a structure built for it, so nothing is missed and no meeting is needed. Your team reviews rather than writes, and you take the decisions.

Managed Performance Optimisation. Access to the reporting that carries authorisation, declines, exemption use and retries, plus the contract and its notice dates.

Interim assignments. A scope and a duration, agreed before the assignment starts, and a place in the team for that period.

Beyond providing that, no internal project resource is required.

EcomStream does the work and hands over what it establishes in writing.

Cut your PSP costs. Where your rates and terms stand against the benchmark as at the date of the engagement, and the renegotiated contract, with rates below the benchmark as the aim. Where pass-through cost verification is added, what was billed incorrectly and what was recovered.

Run a payment RFP. The requirements, a like-for-like comparison of the offers, and the decision file that answers if the award is ever questioned.

Managed Performance Optimisation. Every month, per market and payment method, where payments stall and what was done about it, with the contract calendar.

Interim assignments. The work is carried inside your organisation, so it stays there when the assignment ends.

All it asks of your team is to read it.

A cost optimisation engagement typically runs from four to eight weeks from first analysis to renegotiation outcome. A payment RFP takes longer, usually three to four months depending on the number of PSPs in scope and the complexity of the integration requirements. Interim engagements are scoped individually based on the specific need.

Managed Performance Optimisation is the exception. It has no end date. It runs month to month and stops when you stop it.

EcomStream treats all client data as strictly confidential from the first conversation. PSP invoices, contract terms, transaction data, and any commercially sensitive information shared during the engagement are never disclosed to PSPs, acquirers, or any third party, regardless of whether a formal NDA is in place. Client data is processed in a closed environment and is never entered into any AI system that retains it or trains on it. A mutual NDA can be put in place at the start of the engagement. The PSP does not need to know that EcomStream is involved unless the client chooses to disclose it.

You will sell more and pay less.