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Managed Performance Optimisation
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 analysis that would catch the drift never happens.
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The start
It starts with a diagnostic sprint. Authorisation performance reviewed by payment method, market 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 once it is done. Instead of the report going in a drawer, the analysis continues.
The sprint is the start of the arrangement and is not invoiced separately.
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What EcomStream takes off your hands
Performance watch. EcomStream analyses your authorisation rate, decline patterns, exemption usage and retry logic, and acts on anything your PSP has neglected or could be doing better. Nothing is too small to act on. Network tokenisation is a plain example. A card on file carrying a network token is approved more often than a raw card number, and expiry and reissue updates arrive on their own, so recurring payments stop failing for a reason nobody sees. On a set-up that has run for a few years it is often simply not switched on.
Contract calendar. EcomStream tracks your notice periods and auto-renewals, the pricing changes your provider announces, and the changes your PSP makes to its terms 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.
Contract strength. Not everything a provider can give you is priced. Uptime and availability commitments, incident response and escalation paths, support levels and named contacts, reporting and access to your own data, release and roadmap commitments, portability of your card vault. Those sit in the SLA and the schedules rather than on the rate card, and they are what you fall back on when something goes wrong. EcomStream holds what your agreement actually promises against what the provider delivers, and puts the gap on the table at the review.
New services and tools. What your provider wants to bring in is weighed on the value it adds against what it costs, before anything is agreed.
Payment roadmap and change projects. Large changes rarely run through payments alone. A replatform, a new market, a migration to another PSP, a till software integration. EcomStream keeps the payment roadmap, what comes when and what has to be finished first, and sits in those projects as a standing participant, so the payment side is designed in rather than discovered at go-live.
Vendor management. EcomStream runs the quarterly review with your PSP on your mandate. Today it is your e-commerce, finance or IT manager, with payments as one file alongside eight other files, sitting opposite three commercial specialists from your PSP, who do nothing else all week. That asymmetry is why those reviews rarely produce anything.
Fraud and disputes. A dispute is a customer who took their complaint to their bank instead of to you, and a good part of them never had to get that far. What follows is usually improvised: evidence pulled together by hand, deadlines noticed late, the occasional order both refunded and charged back. Screening has the same shape, rules set at onboarding that still turn good customers away at checkout. The rules, the route a case takes and who picks it up are read against your own numbers and improved.
Questions from your business. Marketing wants a method live before a campaign. Finance asks why a batch of chargebacks landed twice. E-commerce wants to know whether a new wallet is worth building. Those questions go to whoever answers first, usually your provider's own account manager. They come to EcomStream instead, answered on your numbers, with a position we take into the next provider conversation.
What it returns. What is earned back is reported in euros on your own volume, not as a percentage and not as an index. A point of acceptance gained, a basis point removed, a fee that is no longer charged: each one traces back to an amount. Where a change turns out to return nothing, that is reported too.
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Does any of this sound familiar?
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What this does not cover
This arrangement covers payment performance only, and carries no fee on anything else. Rates, interchange, scheme fees, acquirer markup, invoice reconciliation and the commercial terms around them belong to the PSP cost optimisation service. Provider selection and tendering belong to the payment RFP service. The non-commercial side of the agreement, the service levels and everything a provider can give you that is not price, is part of this arrangement. Chargeback fees, fraud tool fees and per-transaction risk fees are priced items and belong to PSP cost optimisation. The set-up of your fraud rules and of your dispute process is part of payment performance.
Where the checkout itself is the constraint rather than the payment layer, the reference is checkout flow optimisation.
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The three arrangements
What differs is how quickly anything is noticed and answered, and what comes with it. Read them as a menu rather than a choice you have to make now.
This kind of fractional arrangement is often a step towards a permanent hire. Not this one. Below a certain volume a full-time payment manager simply does not stack up against your turnover, so the choice is not between EcomStream and someone on your payroll. It is between a payment set-up that is managed every month and one without ownership. There is no end date. It runs for as long as it earns its place.
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What it costs
No upfront fee, in any of our services. This arrangement runs on a fixed fee per month, invoiced at the end of the month, and the diagnostic sprint is part of it.
PSP cost optimisation and this arrangement multiply each other. A renegotiation lowers what every transaction costs and leaves your authorisation rate exactly where it was. This side raises the share that completes, so the lower cost base applies to more orders and every recovered point of authorisation carries it. A realised saving is therefore the natural budget for this: it turns a one-off cut into a margin that keeps improving.
Start with the half hour. If the bigger leak is in your costs, start with PSP cost optimisation.
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 Managed Performance Optimisation
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Clients worked for
