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Run a payment RFP
An independent tender for your payment set-up, run on your side of the table.
An RFP is the one moment in a payment relationship when the leverage sits with you. Before you sign, every provider in the market wants your volume and prices accordingly. After you sign, the integration is built, the switching cost is real, and the rates that looked sharp on day one are the rates you carry for the next five years.
Most tenders spend that moment badly. Requirements get written from a template, or from the incumbent's own feature list. Proposals arrive in five different formats and are compared on the one number that is easy to compare, the headline transaction fee, which is rarely where the money is. The provider with the strongest commercial team wins, not the provider with the strongest proposition.
Named references
vidaXL. Commercial optimisation across the entire payment infrastructure, several providers and several markets, delivering a seven-figure annual saving.
Homefashion Group (Leen Bakker and Kwantum). A payment RFP across four online platforms and 276 stores.
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When an RFP is the right instrument
A tender is not the answer to every payment problem, and it is the more expensive one to get wrong. If your provider still fits your business and only your pricing has drifted away from the market, you do not need to move, you need leverage. That is cut your PSP costs, where the renegotiation runs with your incumbent and the integration stays where it is. If that conversation has run its course and the number has not moved, price stops being a reason to stay and becomes a reason to go to market.
An RFP is the right instrument when the set-up itself no longer fits. New markets with their own acquiring, schemes and local payment methods. A move to unified commerce where online and the kassa have to sit in one place. A replatform that reopens the integration anyway. A provider whose service changed after an acquisition. Or a renewal you are only willing to sign once you have seen what the rest of the market puts on the table.
Price is a trigger in its own right once that point is reached. Where the incumbent will not move, or the gap turns out to be structural rather than negotiable, competition is the only instrument left, and it is what makes the number move.
The distinction is commercial, not procedural. What decides the outcome is whether you are genuinely prepared to move. A tender run purely as pressure, without that willingness, is read as exactly that by the market, and the proposals come back priced accordingly.
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Does any of this sound familiar?
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Where tenders lose money
The headline transaction fee is the number every merchant compares and the number every provider prices to win. The margin sits in what surrounds it. Acquirer markup on top of interchange, how scheme fees are handled and billed, the treatment of refunds and chargebacks, FX on cross-border settlement, gateway and account charges, minimum monthly commitments, and the rate review clause that decides whether your pricing follows your growth or stays where you signed it.
A tender awarded on headline rate alone routinely hands the winner back everything it conceded, well inside the first contract term, through lines nobody scored.
The second thing tenders lose is the leverage itself. Providers know precisely which merchants are genuinely willing to move and which are collecting quotes to wave at their incumbent. How the process is positioned is worth more than any single question in the document.
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Why independence changes the outcome
EcomStream has never worked for a PSP or an acquirer and never will. No referral fees, no implementation revenue, no provider relationships to protect. The shortlist is built on what fits your business, and the recommendation is not shaped by who pays whom.
What EcomStream brings that no template does is knowing where the market genuinely prices for a merchant of your profile, drawn from tenders and audits run across comparable retailers and brands. That is the difference between asking a provider for a discount and knowing what that provider can still give.
Every engagement is handled personally by Ramon Helwegen, in payments since 2009, including eight years on the PSP side of exactly these processes.
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Run it yourself: the opportunity trap
Some merchants run the payment RFP themselves. The document is the part of it that is easiest to get right.
What decides the outcome is the benchmark the responses are judged against. Every proposal takes your current contract as its basis, so comparing the responses with what you pay now does not establish whether the winning price is competitive. A provider prices to beat the incumbent by the margin it needs to win, not to the limit of what it can still offer. The performance side is scored the same way: authorisation rate, routing and retries arrive as claims, and without an outside reference they can only be weighed against each other.
The result is recorded as a saving and an improvement, at a level below what the market would have given. The term is signed and the migration is paid for, so the missed saving and the missed performance improvements run for years, until the contract comes up for renewal.
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How the process runs
EcomStream runs the tender end to end on your mandate, from the first data pull to the signed contract. Requirements and shortlist, evaluation, then negotiation and award. You approve the shortlist and you take the decision, EcomStream does the work in between.
Implementation support through the migration is optional and runs on a day rate, scoped separately from the tender. The ongoing management once you are live is optional too, and runs as Managed Performance Optimisation.
Four to five months from kick-off to signature is normal for a set-up of that scope. More markets, more providers or more internal stakeholders extend it. With one market and one incumbent the process is shorter.
A tender is not the same thing as covering a gap in your payments team. That is an interim assignment, on a day rate.
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The selection room
Every payment RFP runs in its own selection room, a private workspace in your branding, with your requirements and your criteria. Your team works in it, every invited provider works in it, and the tender lives there instead of in six inboxes. EcomStream runs the selection room itself, and no other outside party has access to your commercial data.
The requirements are written for your business, not lifted from a template. The intake covers the full set-up, from acquiring and cardmix per market to unified commerce, 3DS and SCA, chargebacks, settlement and FX, PCI scope, service levels and the commercial structure underneath.
Providers never see each other, and none of them sees your cost base, your incumbent, your weighting or your non-negotiables. Nothing goes to an AI model or any other third party. When the award is questioned later, the tender file answers.
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What it asks of your team
Less than you would expect, by design. EcomStream drafts the requirements from your data, your team reviews rather than writes, and each section goes only to the person who owns it. Nobody reads a hundred questions to answer four.
Nothing is mandatory, progress saves as you go, and what is missing EcomStream fills in. Access is by personal invitation and ends with the tender.
The decisions are yours: the requirements, the shortlist, the sessions with the providers and the final choice, together with the internal alignment each of those needs. In practice most teams want more visibility than that, and they get it. You see every response as it lands, sit in on whichever sessions you want to sit in on, and read the scoring itself rather than a summary of it. What stays with EcomStream is the work around those moments, the drafting, the chasing, the comparison and the negotiation. A walkthrough takes fifteen minutes and commits you to nothing.
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What it costs
No cure, no pay. No upfront fee, no retainer. EcomStream is paid a share of the savings the tender delivers, measured on your own volumes against your current cost base, and only once they are contracted.
That does not make the cheapest quote the recommendation. The requirements decide which providers can do the job at all, and only those are weighed on price. Where the strongest fit is not the lowest quote, the advice says so, and the fee follows the price of the provider you actually choose rather than the lowest one on the table. A provider that cannot deliver is not a saving.
If the outcome is that your current provider is the right one at the right price, that is a legitimate result of the process and it costs you nothing.
That covers the tender itself. The optional implementation support through the migration is charged on a day rate, agreed before it starts.
Start the conversation. If your provider still fits and only the pricing has drifted, start with cutting your PSP costs. If the gap is in authorisation rate rather than in rates, that is Managed Performance 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 running a payment RFP
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Clients worked for
