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Cut your PSP costs
An independent review of your PSP costs, 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.
No fixed cost and no switch of provider: no financial and no operational risk.
Named references
Swiss Sense. Contract improvement and smarter scheme routing reduced monthly provider costs by around 20 to 25 per cent.
Bugaboo. The renegotiation delivered a six-figure annual saving and materially better commercial terms.
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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 to beat that benchmark.
There is no wrong moment for this. The case rests on your own invoice set against the current market rate, and that comparison holds at any point in the contract cycle. Some moments simply add leverage, a renewal in sight, a step up in volume, a shift in cardmix or a new market going live, and where one of those is close we time the conversation around it.
Price itself can also be the reason to go to tender. If the provider will not move, or the gap turns out to be structural rather than negotiable, the mandate shifts from renegotiation to selection. The same holds where the set-up itself no longer fits, because then price was never the problem: run a payment RFP.
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A contract with time left on it
A remaining term binds the relationship, not the price. Rates sit in a pricing schedule, and amending that schedule does not reopen the agreement, does not restart the term and does not touch a line of your integration. It happens routinely, because the volume a provider holds on to by moving is worth more to it than the margin it keeps by refusing.
Part of the work is not a negotiation at all. Your invoice states that interchange and scheme fees are billed as pass-through. Whether that holds is a question of fact, answered by a forensic audit at fee line level rather than at the negotiating table, and the term of your contract has no bearing on the outcome. Where the pass-through is not clean, what comes back was never yours to pay. Verifying it runs inside this engagement, as an option on the cost work: pass-through cost verification.
It also pays to read what your own agreement already allows. Notice periods, tacit renewal, minimum commitments and the clauses governing when pricing can be reopened were negotiated once and rarely looked at since. The first thing this engagement does is establish what your contract permits, and that is regularly more than the merchant holding it assumes.
Switching, incidentally, is always possible. Where a minimum commitment sits in the contract it is often worth far less than a move produces, which makes it a reason to put the renegotiation to your current provider first rather than a reason to stay put. If the agreement renews tacitly, the date that matters is the notice date, not the end date, and a credible alternative takes months to build rather than weeks. The arithmetic meanwhile runs against you: on 25 million euros of volume a gap of twenty-five basis points is 62,500 euros a year, so eighteen months spent waiting for a renewal is close to 94,000 euros that never comes back.
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Does any of this sound familiar?
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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 and billed, and whether anything is added on top. 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.
Where your contract is already pass-through, the question is no longer what the rate is but whether the interchange and scheme fees reaching your invoice are the amounts the schemes actually charged. That is a reconciliation rather than a negotiation, and it is covered by pass-through cost verification, a deliverable inside this engagement.
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You sign a PSP contract once. Its terms apply to every euro you grow afterwards.
A PSP contract is signed on the offer on the table at the time and then runs for years. Every tenth of a percentage point agreed too high is paid on all the volume that follows, in new markets and on new methods too. On 50 million euros of volume that is 50,000 euros of EBITDA a year. If volume grows over three years through 65 to 80 million euros, it is 195,000 euros over the term.
Merchants test those terms against a benchmark or against what peers pay. That shows whether they are at market level. Market level is the average, with the poorly negotiated contracts counted in.
EcomStream's aim is to beat the benchmark, on PSP costs and on payment performance, and to fix that for the term. The same arithmetic then works for you: every tenth of a point below the market grows with your volume, as does every point of authorisation rate above it.
No cure, no pay on cost and payment RFP engagements.
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Why independence changes the outcome
EcomStream has never worked for a PSP or an acquirer and never will. No revenue share with providers, 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.
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Do it yourself: the opportunity trap
Most of the cost stack is documented and you can map it yourself. Interchange is capped in regulation and scheme fees are set by the schemes, so neither is negotiated. What is negotiated is your acquirer markup, your per-method rates and the ancillary lines, and none of that is published anywhere.
So the figure you open with sets the ceiling. Ask fifteen basis points where forty was there and you get fifteen, usually tied to a longer term and additional business commitments. The rest stays unclaimed until the file reopens two or three years later. Missed momentum, opportunity gone. On 25 million euros of volume that difference is 62,500 euros a year on EBITDA, against which the success fee is usually earned back within months.
It is also the moment to correct the terms around the rate: notice periods, automatic renewal, the right to reopen pricing mid-term, settlement data at fee line level, card vault portability. They cost a provider little at signing and decide what your position looks like in three years.
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How it works
One data pull from your side, then the work sits with EcomStream. Your invoices and contract are analysed line by line and set against the benchmark for your profile. What comes back is the position: what you pay, where the benchmark sits, and the saving achievable below it.
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.
Pass-through cost verification. On an interchange++ contract you can have the pass-through itself verified as part of this engagement: interchange and scheme fees reconciled at fee line level against the official published rates and against what the PSP actually charged. It is an option, it adds nothing to the fee, and the only thing it asks of you is more data. What it covers.
Cost and performance together
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 ongoing arrangement that keeps a hand on all of it, month after month.
A renegotiation lowers what every transaction costs. It does not change how many of them complete: authorisation, declines, retries and exemption use sit outside your pricing and do not move when a rate comes down.
Run the two together and the saving works as a multiplier. A lower cost per transaction, applied to a higher share of transactions that complete, lands on both sides of the margin: you pay less on every order, and there are more orders to pay less on. Funding the performance side out of the saving you have just realised is the sharpest use of that money.
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Your provider negotiates with you. EcomStream runs the negotiation.
Many merchants prefer to keep the relationship with their PSP in their own hands. In silent partner mode the provider deals only with your team, from the first request to the signed contract. Everything that goes into that conversation is prepared by EcomStream.
What you do. You send the messages we write, join the calls you have been briefed for and take the final decision. Nothing is drafted, analysed or calculated on your side.
What EcomStream does. The analysis of your invoices and PSP contract, the target terms per fee line, every message to the provider ready to send, a brief before each call, every counter-proposal valued in euros on EBITDA, and the review of the final contract text.
Why it takes no extra time. The work that takes time, reading the contract, modelling the fees and building the case, sits with EcomStream. What reaches you is finished: a text to send, a brief to read, a proposal in euros with the decision it asks of you.
Why merchants choose it. The relationship with your provider stays with you. There is no third party at the table and the provider's account manager keeps the same counterpart.
Silent partner mode is available on every PSP cost engagement, on the terms set out below. Mention it when you get in touch, and the engagement is set up that way from the first message.
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What it costs
The engagement carries no financial and no operational risk. There is no fixed cost: the fee comes out of the saving, and without a saving there is no fee. There is no switch: the renegotiation runs within your current PSP contract, so integration, checkout and settlement stay as they are.
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. The large majority of the saving goes to you from day one, and your share grows step by step over the success fee period until the full saving is yours. The success fee paid to EcomStream is degressive.
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.
Payment set-up check
See where your payment set-up carries avoidable cost
A PSP contract is priced once, while your volume, card mix and markets keep moving. Enter your webshop URL: the check names what your checkout misses in each of your markets. Each point comes with the service that addresses it.
Free, no email address needed.
Swiss Sense: monthly provider costs reduced by around 20 to 25 per cent. Read the case
I'm interested in cutting my PSP costs
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Clients worked for
