Your fractional payment performance manager.

Payment performance does not fail loudly. An authorisation rate does not drop three percentage points overnight, it drifts half a percentage point a quarter. An exemption you were entitled to and never claimed appears nowhere on an invoice. A retry rule that stopped matching your issuer mix costs you orders every day and reports nothing. By the time a number is visibly wrong, the money has been leaving for eighteen months.

For most retailers and brands a full-time payments manager does not stack up against the volume. Payments becomes one more file on a finance or category manager's desk, and the reading that would catch the drift never happens.

The first ninety days are a diagnostic sprint. Authorisation performance reviewed by payment method, market, issuer and device. Decline and soft decline analysis against benchmark. SCA exemption and 3DS configuration reviewed, including TRA usage and challenge rates. Retry and routing logic assessed against your actual issuer mix rather than the configuration you were given at onboarding. The output is a diagnosis, a prioritised set of changes, and direct support implementing them with your PSP.

That is the same work a project engagement delivers. The difference is what happens on day ninety-one. Instead of the report going in a drawer, the reading continues.

Performance watch. EcomStream reads your authorisation rate, decline patterns, exemption usage and retry logic every month, and acts on anything your PSP has neglected or could be doing better. Nothing is too small to act on.

Contract calendar. EcomStream tracks your notice periods and auto-renewals, the scheme fee bulletins that move your cost base, and the changes your PSP makes to its terms, its pricing and its checkout. Those changes rarely arrive with an explanation of what they cost you, and almost never with time to respond. Each one is raised early enough that you still have room to negotiate.

Vendor management. EcomStream runs the quarterly review with your PSP on your mandate. Today one manager who handles payments alongside eight other files faces three commercial people who do this every day. That asymmetry is why those reviews rarely produce anything.

Our authorisation rate dropped three percentage points after our PSP made a configuration change and we cannot get a clear explanation of why.

We know our SCA exemption rate is low but our PSP says everything is set up correctly. We are not convinced.

Our decline rate for German card transactions is significantly higher than for other markets and no one can tell us why.

This arrangement covers payment performance only, and carries no fee on anything else. Rate cards, interchange, scheme fees, acquirer markup, invoice reconciliation and contract terms are Option A, cut your PSP costs. Provider selection and tendering are Option B, run a payment RFP.

Where the monthly reading identifies a commercial finding, EcomStream reports it to you in writing within fourteen days with a recommended course of action, and quotes it as an Option A or Option B engagement depending on what it calls for. No size threshold applies. A saving is a saving. You are free to award that work elsewhere or handle it internally.

All three include the full arrangement: the monthly reading, action on what your provider has neglected, and EcomStream running your quarterly review on your mandate. They differ in the scope of your payment set-up.

Six-month initial term, two months notice thereafter. The fee is quoted per arrangement.

A gap in your payments team is not a tier. That is an interim assignment, on a day rate, until you have hired.

Engage EcomStream under Option A while this arrangement runs and every euro you have paid here comes off the success fee earned there, however long or short a time the arrangement has been running. The monthly fee is not money on top, it comes off.

The two together are the sharper deal: cost work takes the leakage out, this keeps it out, and the fee runs through the credit. On its own, this is a fixed amount per month.

Start with the diagnostic sprint. If the bigger leak is in your costs, start with Option A, cut your PSP costs.