Independent · Ireland
Know what you actually pay to accept card payments
Send us one to three months of card processing statements. Within five working days you get your true cost in writing, broken down line by line, with every fee explained.
- No charge
- No obligation
- Five working days
- The analysis is yours
What an effective rate is actually made of
A worked example at 130 bps. Illustrative only — not client data.
Illustrative effective rate of 130 basis points, made up of Interchange 42 basis points (pass-through), Scheme fees 18 basis points (pass-through), Acquirer margin 48 basis points (negotiable), Fixed costs 22 basis points (negotiable). 60 basis points are pass-through cost and 70 basis points are open to negotiation.
Two of the four are pass-through and cannot be discounted by anyone. The audit tells you which is which, on your own numbers.
The problem
Why this cost goes unexamined
Card statements are not built to be read
A single month can run to dozens of fee lines across several merchant IDs, under names like "service charge" or "non-qualified surcharge" that appear nowhere in your agreement. What you would need in order to check the bill against what you were sold is usually not in it.
Nobody in the business owns this line
Card processing fees are netted off your settlement before the money reaches your account. There is no invoice, so there is nothing for anyone to approve, and nothing to query. The cost sits between operations and finance and belongs to neither.
Rates drift, because nothing pushes them down
Your rate was set on the day you signed. Since then the card schemes have changed their fees twice a year, every year, and your provider has passed those changes through. Nothing in the arrangement pushes in the other direction.
You cannot see what is cost and what is margin
Most Irish merchants are on blended pricing — one rate covering everything. That rate hides interchange, which is the portion paid to the bank that issued your customer’s card and which your provider cannot change. Under a blended rate you cannot tell where the pass-through cost ends and your provider’s margin begins.
The free audit
What the free audit gives you
A written document, delivered in five working days. Yours to keep either way.
Your effective rate, in basis points
Total card processing cost divided by total card turnover. One basis point is one hundredth of a percent. This is the only figure that compares meaningfully across providers, pricing models and time.
That rate split four ways
Interchange, scheme fees, your acquirer’s margin, and fixed costs. Two of those four are pass-through and cannot be negotiated. Two of them can.
Every fee line named and explained
Including the ones that appear only as codes, and the ones that appear on some merchant IDs but not others.
What is avoidable, sized in euro per year
Each item with the reason it is being charged and what would have to change to stop it.
Where your merchant IDs are billed inconsistently
In a multi-site estate the same fee is often applied differently across sites, and the difference is rarely deliberate.
A summary you can hand to your board
Written so that your finance director does not need it translated first.
What an effective rate is actually made of
A worked example at 130 bps. Illustrative only — not client data.
Illustrative effective rate of 130 basis points, made up of Interchange 42 basis points (pass-through), Scheme fees 18 basis points (pass-through), Acquirer margin 48 basis points (negotiable), Fixed costs 22 basis points (negotiable). 60 basis points are pass-through cost and 70 basis points are open to negotiation.
- Interchange42 bps · pass-through
- Paid to the bank that issued the card. Your provider collects it and passes it on.
- Scheme fees18 bps · pass-through
- Paid to Visa and Mastercard for running the networks. Revised twice a year.
- Acquirer margin48 bps · negotiable
- What your provider keeps. The part a blended rate hides most effectively.
- Fixed costs22 bps · negotiable
- Terminal rental, gateway, PCI, admin and minimum monthly charges.
Two of the four components are pass-through and cannot be discounted by anyone. Knowing where the pass-through cost ends and your provider's margin begins is the difference between a real conversation and a sales pitch.
The process
How it works
Send your statements
One to three months, covering every merchant ID you hold. PDF or CSV, whatever your provider issues. Do not attach them to your first email — get in touch first and we will reply with a secure upload link.
We analyse them — five working days
We rebuild your cost from the statement line by line, calculate your effective rate, and separate the pass-through cost from your provider’s margin.
You decide
You get the document and the explanation. If you want to take it from there yourself, that is a legitimate outcome and you owe us nothing.
Implementation and ongoing management
If you go ahead, we implement the changes, lock a baseline with you before anything moves, then report against that baseline every month and track the card scheme fee changes that land twice a year.
Who it's for
Who this is for
Multi-site retail and hospitality
Roughly 10 to 50 sites and €15m to €100m in annual card turnover. Pharmacy groups, restaurant and coffee groups, hotel groups, specialist retail.
Fixed fees multiply by site. Terminal estates drift out of line with what is being billed. Pre-authorisations that were never cleared generate fees nobody has connected to the front desk.
See the cost patterns we look forSoftware platforms handling payments for their customers
Hospitality systems, booking platforms and vertical SaaS that process card payments on behalf of the businesses using them.
Your processing cost sits inside your take rate, so it is a margin question rather than an overhead question. Cost per transaction moves with the issuing region of the card, and cross-border acquiring changes the arithmetic again.
See the cost patterns we look forWhere our incentives sit
Why independent matters here
Most of the people offering to review your card fees in Ireland are brokers. They are paid a commission by the acquirer they move you to, calculated as a share of what you go on to pay that acquirer. Their incentive is to move you. It is not to lower your cost.
We are paid by you. Never by an acquirer, a payment provider or a terminal supplier — no commission, no referral fee, no revenue share. Part of what we charge depends on savings we can document against a baseline you agreed before anything changed.
That is the whole distinction, and we will not labour it further.
Questions
What people ask before sending anything
What do you need from me?
One to three months of card processing statements covering every merchant ID you hold. PDF or CSV, whatever your provider sends. If your merchant services agreement is easy to lay hands on it helps, but it is not required to get started.
Is the audit really free?
Yes. No charge, no obligation, and the document is yours to keep. We do it this way because reading a statement properly is the only honest demonstration of whether we are any use to you. If you do not go ahead, we do not earn anything from it.
My statements are commercially sensitive.
They are, and we treat them that way. We do not share them, we do not pass them to any acquirer or provider, and we do not use them as examples. We will not ask you to send them as an email attachment — we reply with a secure upload link instead. This site has no contact form, no analytics cookies and no third-party processor handling your enquiry: you email us directly. We delete statements on request, and by default once the audit is complete unless you ask us to hold them.
How long does it take?
Five working days from the point we have complete statements. A large estate with many merchant IDs can take longer, and if that is the case we will tell you before we start rather than after.
Do I have to switch provider?
No. A good deal of what turns up in a statement is fixable where you are — a point-of-sale configuration error, billing for terminals that were decommissioned, a compliance fee you can remove by completing a form. Switching is one option among several and it is often not the first one.
What if I am already well priced?
Then the audit will say so. A competitive headline rate does not always mean the fixed and admin fees are right, so it is still worth looking, but if there is nothing there worth doing we would rather tell you that than manufacture a project.
How are you paid?
By you. A one-off setup fee, a monthly retainer scaled to your card volume, and a share of savings we can document. Pricing scales with volume and we will send you the full breakdown on request.
Are you a broker?
No. A broker earns a commission from the provider they place you with. We take no commission, no referral fee and no revenue share from any acquirer or payment provider, which is why we can tell you to stay where you are when staying where you are is the right answer.
Get started
Start with your statements
Tell us a little about your estate and we will send secure upload instructions by reply.
Email us and we will take it from there.
No form, no tracking, and nothing stored on your device. Your enquiry goes straight to us.
Useful to include
- Your company and your role.
- Roughly how many sites you operate, or your approximate annual card volume.
- Who you process with today, if you know.
- Anything about your card costs that has prompted you to look at this.
What happens next
- We reply within one working day with a secure upload link.
- You send one to three months of statements.
- Five working days later you get your audit.
- You decide what, if anything, you want to do next.
Getting in touch does not commit you to anything. We do not add you to a mailing list and we do not pass your details to anyone. See our privacy policy.