Get laser focused on your merchant payment acceptance costs and obtain better pricing with Redbridge Payments Advisory.
Lack of transparency is a real problem that is hard to solve alone.
If you ask your payment providers whether their pricing is fair and your card acceptance costs are reasonable, they will tell you either:
- that they are, or
- refuse to comment.
This is because they are a business that primarily acts in their own interest, not that of their merchants.
Without a means of comparison, it is extremely difficult – if not impossible – to know where your business sits on the price spectrum between best-in-class and bottom of the league.
It is a ‘Wild West’ where each merchant must try to determine what is best for them in extremely challenging and uncertain circumstances.
Establish your baseline
To determine whether your costs and pricing are fair requires that you first understand your total cost of payments acceptance, plus all the individual fee components – both obvious and hidden.
For debit and credit card transactions, there are so many fees and conditions that apply that it can be bewildering and hard to know where to start. To name but a few:
Gateway fees
Acquiring fees
Percentage and basis point figures
Card scheme and interchange fees
Domestic and cross border fees
Blended pricing vs. interchange++
Tokenization fees
Fraud and chargebacks fees
Multiple provider contracts and payment flows
Multiple different file formats, structures and data sources – internal and external
This is an extremely complex and time-consuming process, even for payments teams that have the knowledge, tools and resources to do it. Even skilled and experienced Payments and Treasury teams can lack the core technical knowledge and resources to achieve this.
Even then – after having established your baseline costs – how can you tell if the result is good or not?
Benchmark with your industry
Our payments consultants are specialists dedicated to analyzing merchant payment acceptance costs and commercial frameworks across industries. With billions of transactions analyzed and hundreds of merchant and provider contracts optimized, Redbridge Payments Advisory has the data and expertise needed to assess whether what you pay is fair and how to achieve better results.
We have data and insights obtained from multiple merchant verticals, sectors, channels and markets, and have vast experience across the third-party provider landscape. In short – we know, because we’ve seen and done it all before many times over.
Hidden and hard to negotiate fees
Some payment acceptance costs are obvious, but many are not. Individual line-item fees are sometimes incorrectly regarded as fixed or non-negotiable. Some fees can be incorrect, hidden or hard to pick apart with clarity. Provider contracts may seem to be locked in for long periods and as not being able to be challenged or amended.
We can solve this. Almost everything is negotiable if you know how. Almost every commercial condition – known and unknown – can be improved if you know what to look for and how to accomplish it.
Multiple technical, operational and commercial methods can be applied to achieve better results.
At Redbridge Payments Advisory, we have a tried and trusted playbook that has led to significantly improved pricing conditions and acceptance costs for enterprise merchants –reliably and consistently.
Why choose Redbridge
We deliver total transparency and confidence to your payment acceptance costs and pricing.
Enterprise merchants, marketplaces and platforms – including many global brands – have chosen Redbridge Payments Advisory to understand and improve their payments costs.
Our acceptance cost services range across varying levels of depth depending on opportunity and need.
Examples include:
- Identify and fix historical billing errors and receive credits back as compensation
- Fix individual line-item fees to obtain better results on specific price points
- Negotiate better contract pricing with existing and new providers
- Drive increased competitiveness on cost through a multi-provider strategy
- Run RFPs to land on better provider conditions and options
- Negotiate with card schemes, such as Visa and Mastercard, on scheme fees and interchange
- Negotiate directly with card issuers on per merchant interchange frameworks
- Implement holistic pricing frameworks that drive cost efficiency as you scale
- Complete Group-level transformation projects to land on better pricing and commercial conditions globally
Our unique combination of expertise, industry benchmark data and granular analysis means we are the leading firm to achieve optimized results for our clients. We are excellent negotiators.
We always take the full context of your business into consideration and deliver maximum benefit; often delivering more than was originally requested as we find incremental opportunities during the course of our analysis.
We invite you to meet with our friendly and professional team of consultants. Start the conversation today and accelerate toward your ideal outcome.