Reading a fee report like a CFO
Your PSP statement contains the answer to most of your cost-reduction questions. Almost nobody reads it properly.
Ask a payments team what their effective rate is and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask them to derive it from the actual PSP statement and the room goes quiet.
PSP fee reports are dense by design. They are also where the savings live.
Three numbers to compute every month
Forget the headline rate your provider quotes. Compute these yourself, from the raw statement:
- All-in cost per approved transaction. Total fees divided by approved volume. This is the only number that matters at the P&L level.
- Interchange share. What portion of your fees is genuinely pass-through, versus PSP margin? This tells you where negotiation leverage actually exists.
- Scheme fee drift. Visa and Mastercard adjust scheme fees twice a year. They almost always go up. If your PSP is on full pass-through, you should see this in your numbers. If you don't, ask why.
The line items that hide real money
A few categories deserve a hard look every quarter:
- Cross-border fees. If your routing sends transactions through an acquirer in a different country from the issuer, you are paying a meaningful uplift. Sometimes this is unavoidable. Often it is a routing decision that can be changed.
- DCC and FX margins. Dynamic currency conversion looks like a courtesy to the user. The margin sits with the provider. Decide consciously whether you want this revenue or want to pass it through.
- Chargeback fees and representment. A €15 chargeback fee on a €40 transaction is a 37% cost. A representment program that wins 30% of disputed cases is one of the highest-ROI projects you can run.
Reconcile end-to-end
The most uncomfortable exercise — and the most rewarding — is to pick a single day and reconcile it from transaction log to bank settlement. You will find rounding, FX timing, and fee categorisations that do not match what you expected. Sometimes you will find errors in your favour. Sometimes the other way. Either way, you will never read a statement the same way again.
The work is not glamorous. It is also the difference between a payments team that runs the business and one that is run by its providers.
Strategic advisor in digital payments with 15 years of operating experience — from analyst to Head of Payments. Focused on lifting approval rates, lowering cost, and building the risk and compliance frameworks that let fintechs scale.
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