Payments
Revenue scales with volume, but cost scales with exceptions – disputes, edge cases, manual interventions that no amount of clean transactions can make go away. Automating those is the obvious move, but doing it in a way you can still explain to a regulator afterwards is much harder.
We help you identify the difference between the two, and build for better outcomes.
Where we get brought in.
Exception and dispute handling
The more business you do, the more exceptions you’ll encounter. Those exceptions get handled by people, so it's part of the operation that scales with cost instead of revenue. It’s also the part most likely to be automated exactly as it runs today, warts and all. We help you figure out which exceptions are signals and which are noise, so you build the right thing.
Merchant and customer onboarding
Sales wants the new merchant live today; Financial Crime wants more information first. We help you turn those guardrails into requirements that define how your system is built, not a paragraph someone is forced to reinterpret under pressure every time.
Build versus buy
Before committing budget to a vendor, we help you decide the shape of the platform you actually need. The decision you reach will rest on evidence rather than a vendor demo or the highest-paid person’s preference. We don't sell you the build - we help you make an informed call.
Machine readability
Increasingly, the party reading your pricing and terms isn’t a person, it’s a client or partner’s AI agent. We help you make sure it accurately represents your proposition, without requiring a human in the middle to correct it.
What tends to be true here
As a payments business, you may be running two operations: the automated one that gets measured, and the manual exception-handling one that doesn't.
The second is usually where the expert time goes and where the cost compounds.
Risk
Legacy infrastructure dating back to the 90s had been patched rather than modernised. The business had the customers, reach and brand, but no operational platform to grow without increasing headcount at the same rate.
Decision
We identified the root causes, and helped the client stop patching and start rethinking. We redesigned their operating model around three high-impact areas: onboarding, customer support and billing.
CASE STUDY£2.7m annual cost efficiency and 76 FTEs freed for redeployment.
Outcome
£2.7m
annual cost
efficiency identified
76
FTEs freed up for redeployment
The way you’re doing this is amazing. It’s really good. So thank you so much for the work you’re doing. I’m really motivated to see it.
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Head of Customer Support
In a rapidly-growing payments business, risk and cost aren't concentrated in one place. They're spread across functions and acquired businesses, so nobody can see the whole picture. It becomes critical to prioritise optimisation and change programmes that reduce risk and enable further growth. We map where the challenges really sit, so leadership can back the handful of changes that will deliver the biggest impact.
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Moritz Dinger, Strategy Director
