The hardest decisions in payments and fintech are made before product-market fit, with incomplete information, against deadlines that do not flex. The right processing arrangement, the right partner stack, the right first-product narrowing — these compound for a decade. The wrong ones become structural liabilities. We exist to make sure the early decisions are the right ones — and to deliver them when you need a partner who actually ships.
Engagement types
Strategic advisory retainer
Monthly retainer for a fractional payments / fintech leader. We attend the right meetings, write the memos that move decisions, and stay close enough to engineering and finance to call the false starts before they ship. Suited for Series A through Series C and for established mid-market businesses expanding into payments.
Statement and rate audit
A focused audit of your current processor relationship. We unbundle every fee on the statement — interchange categories, scheme assessments, processor margin, gateway fees, downgrades, refund losses — and produce a written analysis showing recoverable basis points and how to recover them. Most audits surface 20–80 bps of leakage in the first month.
Vendor and partner selection
4–8 week engagement to evaluate and select a payments partner — sponsor bank, BaaS platform, KYC vendor, ledger system, gateway, or core. We run structured evaluation, conduct reference calls, review contracts, and produce a written recommendation memo with documented reasoning.
Embedded finance architecture
For software platforms launching payments — the architectural work that determines whether embedded payments becomes a meaningful revenue line or a cost center. Pay-Fac model selection, sub-merchant onboarding flows, risk and compliance posture, ledger architecture, settlement reconciliation. See Embedded Finance & Pay-Fac as a Service.
Regulatory architecture
Working with your counsel, we map your product against the regulatory perimeter: money transmission, custody, lending, securities, KYB. We help you architect the product structure that minimizes regulatory surface where appropriate and embraces it where it's a moat.
Statement and rate audits — how we approach them
An audit is not a sales pitch. It is a written analysis. Each line item on your processor statement is classified, benchmarked, and tied to a specific recoverable lever. We document the levers, quantify the basis-point impact, and tell you what implementation looks like — whether that means renegotiating with your existing processor, optimizing your interchange qualification, or migrating to a better processing arrangement.
When migration is the right answer, we are usually the right destination — but not always. We will tell you when staying is the better move. The audit stands on its own.
Methodology
Every engagement begins with three weeks of listening. We read your processor agreements, your settlement files, your reconciliation reports, your last six chargeback notifications. We talk to your finance team, your engineering leads, and the customer support agent who actually fields the failed-payment tickets. Only then do we open our recommendations document.
We produce documents — written, dated, defensible. Each recommendation has a citation: a line on a settlement file, a clause in your contract, a card-network bulletin. Our work is graded by whether your basis points actually move.
What you get
- A current-state cost-stack analysis with each fee line tied to a contract clause or scheme bulletin.
- A target-state architecture with vendor selection, contract terms, and risk profile documented.
- A written recommendation memo — the artifact your board, CFO, and engineering leads can all reference.
- Implementation oversight or full implementation, depending on engagement scope.
- Post-implementation monitoring — basis-point drift detection — for as long as you want it.
