End-to-end RFP management — requirements scoping, provider evaluation, commercial benchmarking, and negotiation from a position of real market knowledge.
Most PSP selection processes are driven by whoever responds fastest, demonstrates most enthusiastically, or has the best sales team. The technical evaluation is shallow. The commercial negotiation is led by the business team with no benchmark data. The selected provider is rarely the best fit — it's just the one that showed up well in a meeting.
Worse, the people making the decision often don't know what they don't know. Payment processing has a complex and deliberately opaque pricing structure. Interchange-plus, blended rates, scheme fees, foreign exchange margins, settlement timing, reserve policies, and contract lock-in terms all have enormous commercial impact — and most of the variation happens in the details, not the headline rate.
We've seen businesses pay materially more than peers of identical size and profile, purely because they didn't have benchmark data going into a negotiation. That changes immediately when you do.
Before approaching any provider, you need a clear, specific view of what you actually need. We build a requirements framework covering: payment methods by market, settlement currencies, reporting and reconciliation needs, technical integration preferences, fraud and risk requirements, 3DS handling, chargeback management, and growth trajectory. This shapes everything downstream.
We map the PSP landscape against your requirements and shortlist 4–6 providers for full evaluation. Our shortlist is driven entirely by fit — not by relationships or commercial arrangements with providers. We'll tell you when a market leader isn't right for your use case, and when a newer or less-prominent provider is actually the better choice.
We design a structured RFP that forces comparable responses across all providers — making apples-to-apples comparison possible. We manage the process: distributing the RFP, fielding questions, running demos, and maintaining a consistent evaluation framework across all participants.
This is where independent advice creates the most value. We know what comparable businesses pay. We know which fee lines are negotiable and which aren't. We know which providers will flex on reserves, which will move on scheme fee pass-through, and where the real commercial levers are. We use that knowledge to get you a better deal than you'd achieve negotiating alone.
PSP contracts are long, written by the PSP's lawyers, and contain terms that can materially affect your business — particularly around termination, reserves, liability for chargebacks, and data portability. We review the commercial and operational terms and flag anything that warrants pushback or amendment.
We have deep familiarity across the full spectrum — from global enterprise processors to specialist acquirers. These are providers we've worked with directly across RFP and implementation engagements.
We work through your current setup, pain points, growth plans, and technical constraints to build a precise requirements document.
We map the provider landscape against your requirements and recommend a shortlist of 4–6 providers with a clear rationale for each inclusion and exclusion.
We design and send the RFP, manage provider communication, run demos, and maintain a structured evaluation scorecard.
We analyse provider responses against benchmark data, identify negotiation opportunities, and lead or support commercial discussions.
We deliver a structured provider recommendation with full commercial comparison. We review the final contract and flag terms requiring negotiation.
Start with a free 30-minute call. We'll give you an honest assessment of where you stand and what's worth tackling first.