Cut your PSP costs
An independent review of what you pay your PSP, and the renegotiation that follows.
Payment cost does not drift upwards by accident. Your rates were set on the day you signed. Your volume, your cardmix and your markets have moved since, and nothing in a PSP's commercial model rewards it for telling you that the market has moved further still. Pricing tiers exist and are not applied unless you ask for them. Interchange reductions land with the acquirer and are not always passed on. Scheme fees arrive in a blended line that nobody internally can decompose.
The gap between what a merchant pays and what the same merchant could pay widens every year a contract goes unreviewed. On mid-market volumes it is regularly worth a six-figure sum a year, straight onto EBITDA, and it is recovered without touching a line of code or moving a single transaction.
When a renegotiation is the right instrument
You do not need to change provider to fix a price. If your PSP still fits the business, the integration works and the service is sound, what is missing is leverage, not a new contract. That is what this engagement supplies: the benchmark position, the analysis of your own invoice, and the negotiation conducted on your mandate.
The timing that pays best is a renewal in sight, a step up in volume, a change in cardmix or a new market going live. Each of those reopens the commercial conversation on terms that favour you. A contract that quietly auto-renewed two years ago is the most expensive version of the same conversation, and still worth having.
Where the set-up itself no longer fits, price is not the problem and a renegotiation will not fix it. That is a tender: run a payment RFP.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Our payment costs have grown faster than our revenue. Our rates have not moved since we signed and nobody internally can explain the rest of the invoice.
Our invoice states that interchange and scheme fees are passed through at cost. Nobody has ever verified that pass-through.
Our PSP chose our pricing model and calls it the optimal one for us. Is it also the one they earn most from?
Every rate reduction we have asked for came attached to a volume commitment we did not want to make.
We hear what comparable merchants pay. Our PSP does not answer to hearsay.
Where the money actually sits
The transaction fee is the number every merchant looks at and the number every provider is happy to discuss. The margin sits around it. The acquirer markup on top of interchange. How scheme fees are handled, billed and marked up. The pricing model itself, where blended pricing hides what interchange++ would expose. The rate on every method separately, because a sharp card rate says nothing about what you pay on iDEAL, wallets or BNPL.
Then the lines that never make the negotiation. Gateway and account charges, refunds and chargebacks, 3DS, tokenisation and reporting, FX on cross-border settlement, minimum monthly commitments. And the contract terms that decide whether any of it can be revisited before the next renewal: term length, notice, auto-renewal, volume commitments and the rate review clause.
A rate cut on the headline fee, handed back through three lines nobody scored, is the most common outcome of a renegotiation a merchant runs alone.
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 only interest in the room on your side of the table is yours.
What that adds to your position is knowledge of where the market genuinely prices for a merchant of your profile, drawn from audits and tenders run across comparable retailers and brands. That is the difference between asking your provider for a discount and knowing what your 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 conversations.
How it works
One data pull from your side, then the work sits with EcomStream. Your invoices, contract and settlement data are analysed line by line and set against current market pricing for your profile. What comes back is the position: what you pay, what the market pays, and what is recoverable.
The renegotiation is then conducted on your mandate, with your provider, and you sign. Your integration stays where it is. The relationship usually comes out better than it went in, because it becomes an equal one: both sides working from the same numbers, with the commercial terms out in the open rather than assumed.
Not sure the gap is worth pursuing? The PSP Upside Calculator gives a directional estimate in a few minutes, with no data to hand over and no commitment.
A cost engagement takes the leakage out once. Keeping it out is a different job. Rates drift, your cardmix moves, scheme fee bulletins land, your provider changes its terms, and the notice period passes unnoticed. Managed Performance Optimisation is the standing arrangement that keeps a hand on all of it, month after month.
The two run well together, and the fee runs through the credit. Engage a cost engagement while that arrangement runs and every euro paid there comes off the success fee earned here, however long it has been running. The monthly fee is not money on top of the saving, it comes off it.
What it costs
No cure, no pay. No upfront fee, no retainer. EcomStream is paid a share of the savings realised, measured on your own volumes against your current cost base, and only once they are contracted.
If the review shows you are already at the right price, that is a legitimate result and it costs you nothing. You then have the one thing you did not have before: a documented position on your own payment costs.
Start the conversation. If the set-up itself no longer fits, the instrument is a payment RFP. If the gap is in authorisation rate rather than in rates, that is Managed Performance Optimisation.
I'm interested in cutting my PSP costs
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