Global financial advisory firm SRM and payments profitability intelligence platform Torus today announced the launch of the new SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution. This joint offering helps acquirers improve profitability through transaction-level scheme fee assurance, automated reconciliation, and merchant profitability analytics.

The launch coincides with the publication of SRM’s new white paper, “Transforming Acquirer Profitability”, which examines the growing commercial pressures facing acquirers and explains why traditional approaches to scheme fee management are no longer sufficient.

The payments acquiring industry faces increasing pressure from rising operating costs, complex and frequently changing card scheme fee structures, greater regulatory scrutiny and continued margin compression. While interchange fees are relatively transparent and well understood, scheme fees have become significantly more complex, making accurate recovery from merchants increasingly difficult.

As a result, many acquirers continue to rely on manual processes and aggregated reporting, leading to revenue leakage, limited visibility into profitability, and significant operational effort.

The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution addresses these challenges by providing automated transaction-level visibility across scheme fees, settlement reconciliation, and merchant profitability. The solution enables financial institutions to accurately allocate scheme fees, reconcile settlements, identify under- or over-recovery, and strengthen pricing governance.

For the first time, acquirers can achieve 100% merchant-level reconciliation between scheme fee invoices and merchant billing while significantly reducing manual effort and improving management information. Estimates from SRM/Torus suggest that these manual efforts cost the industry more than $200 million each year. By implication, the global acquiring industry could reduce costs incurred through manual processes by up to $1 billion over five years using the SRM and Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution.

“The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed. Growing scheme fee complexity means that traditional reconciliation processes are no longer sufficient,” stated John Berns, Managing Partner at SRM Europe. He continued,” Financial institutions need transaction-level visibility to understand where revenue is being lost, ensure fees are accurately recovered, and make better commercial decisions. Our collaboration with Torus enables these improvements.”

Kirill Lisitsyn, CEO, Torus, added, “By combining SRM’s deep advisory expertise with the Torus transaction-level analytics platform, we’ve created a solution that addresses one of the industry’s largest hidden profit leakage challenges. Our customers are already demonstrating that significant improvements in profitability can be achieved through better fee assurance, stronger pricing governance and automated analytics.”

The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution delivers value across three areas:

  • Interchange and Scheme Fee Assurance

    Automated merchant-level calculation and recovery of interchange and scheme fees, helping minimize revenue leakage and improve billing accuracy.

  • Settlement Reconciliation

    Daily transaction-level reconciliation between schemes and merchant settlement files, providing complete visibility into variances, and improving financial controls.

  • Merchant Profitability Analytics

    Comprehensive daily profitability analysis across merchants, portfolios and segments, enabling better pricing decisions, commercial optimization and stronger management reporting.

Early customer deployments have already demonstrated significant commercial value. For example, one mid-sized European acquirer improved annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million, representing approximately 10% of total scheme fee costs.

Based on SRM’s economic analysis in the report, the industry has the potential to recover approximately $1 billion in operational costs over the next five years and an additional $3–5.5 billion in fee revenue due to more accurate and transparent oversight of currently unavailable data.

The full white paper, “Transforming Acquirer Profitability”, including SRM’s economic analysis is available here, and join a co-hosted webinar on 29 September, where experts will discuss the solution and whitepaper. Register here.

ABOUT SRM

SRM is a global advisory and execution firm that helps financial institutions and fintechs modernize with confidence. For more than 30 years, SRM has gone beyond traditional consulting by uniting strategy, technology, and execution under one roof and one partner—bringing clarity to complexity and momentum to transformation.

SRM consultants and practitioners’ pair deep industry expertise with a bias for action, helping financial organizations modernize payments, optimize vendor sourcing, shape enterprise strategy, accelerate M&A integration, and deploy transformative technologies.

Visit srmcorp.com for more information and follow SRM on LinkedIn.

ABOUT TORUS

Torus is a payments profitability intelligence platform helping banks, acquirers, BaaS providers, and fintech companies move from payment volume to payment economics. It helps them better understand scheme fees, transaction-level profitability, pricing decisions, cost allocation and overall portfolio performance.

Across 33 countries and more than 1.5 billion card transactions annually, the platform helps improve profitability by up to 50% with 100% fee prediction accuracy. Torus has been a winner at the UK FinTech Awards, the PayTech Awards, the FF Awards and MPE.

Visit torusadvisors.com for more information and follow on LinkedIn for news about its SaaS intelligence platform for banks and fintechs.

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