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Pass-through cost verification
Interchange and scheme fees are the largest cost lines in your payment set-up. On a pass-through contract your PSP bills them at exactly what the schemes and issuing banks charge, at cost, without addition. That claim sits on every invoice, and almost no merchant has ever had it independently verified. Pass-through cost verification does exactly that.
It is an option inside a PSP cost optimisation, not a separate engagement. You choose whether it runs, it adds nothing to the fee, and the only thing it asks of you is more data than the cost work needs on its own. It covers interchange and scheme fees. Nothing else.
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The claim we verify
On an interchange++ contract, pass-through means 1:1. Every cent of interchange should trace to the official published rate for that card type and corridor, and every scheme fee should match what Visa and Mastercard actually charged your PSP for your activity. Whether that is genuinely the case cannot be seen on the invoice itself. It only shows when the billing is reconciled against the official rates and against the PSP’s own cost data, at fee line level.
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What we verify
Four components, together your full pass-through cost: interchange per transaction against the official published rates, scheme fees against what the PSP actually charged, interchange returned on refunds against the applicable return rules, and the non-transactional scheme fees on your monthly invoice against the official per-unit rates where these are published. The methodology is proprietary. Every finding is documented at fee line level and stands up to scrutiny by your PSP.
The scope stops there. The acquirer markup and the service and gateway charges are the work of the cost optimisation itself, not of this verification.
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How it works
This is the one thing the option asks of you. It needs more data than the cost optimisation on its own: a set of standard exports from your own PSP environment, including the settlement and fee line detail. Still no integration, no access to systems, no IT project. Within one week the reconciliation is complete at fee line level and the findings are on the table, whether the outcome is clean or leakage. Your data never leaves the closed environment in which the verification runs, is never uploaded to third-party tools and is never processed by an AI system.
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What the report looks like
The verification produces a reconciliation at fee line level, with the coverage of the review, the variance per line and the recovery position stated in full. The example below is illustrative: the figures are fictional and the line detail is redacted.
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What it costs
One conversation is enough to know whether there is anything here
A thirty-minute Teams call, on your own figures. You pay no upfront fee on any of the services. Nothing to prepare, the outline is enough.
I'm interested in a pass-through cost verification
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Clients worked for
