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Financial Services > Payments & Networks Practice

Payments & Networks Practice

Umbrex connects leading payments & networks companies to independent consultants with deep experience in the industry.

Over 90% of our Payments & Networks Practice consultants are alums of McKinsey, Bain, or BCG.

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Prefer email? Write to [email protected]

Client Segments Umbrex Serves

  • Card networks & real-time A2A schemes: Operators of card networks and real-time/ACH schemes; optimizing rulemaking, interchange/fees, tokenization, fraud, acceptance expansion, and regulatory engagement across regions.
  • Merchant acquirers, PayFacs & omnichannel PSPs: Merchant acquirers, PayFacs and omnichannel PSPs serving SMB to enterprise; improving pricing, underwriting, risk, integrations, value-added services, partnership channels, and unit economics.
  • Issuer processors & card program managers: Issuer processors and card program managers powering debit, prepaid, fleet and commercial cards; scaling onboarding, BIN sponsorship partnerships, compliance, tokenization, authorization performance, and international expansion.
  • Cross-border remittance, FX & payout networks: Cross‑border remittance, FX and payout networks serving consumer and enterprise flows; optimizing pricing, liquidity, corridors, compliance, treasury, local settlement, and embedded-partner distribution.
  • POS/commerce ISVs & payment orchestration platforms: POS hardware/software ISVs, commerce platforms and payment orchestration providers; enhancing integrations, routing, token vaults, recurring billing, risk tools, and monetization via embedded payments.

Selected Capabilities of our Payments & Networks Practice

Strategy & Corporate Development

  • Two-Sided Platform Growth Strategy: Define issuer, acquirer, merchant, and consumer value propositions; prioritize use cases; scale acceptance and activation; increase payment volume, take rate, and network effects.
  • Market Entry And International Expansion Strategy: Select priority countries and corridors; evaluate licensing, scheme membership, and regulatory pathways; localize alternative payment methods; accelerate compliant market entry and volume growth.
  • Ecosystem Partnerships And BIN Sponsorship Strategy: Structure partnerships with BIN sponsors, banks, wallets, super apps, ISVs, and gateways; negotiate commercials and incentives; unlock issuing, acceptance, and distribution at scale.
  • M&A And Strategic Investment Thesis: Build thematic theses for PSPs, gateways, issuer processors, cross-border, risk tools; screen targets, synergies, and fit; accelerate inorganic growth and capability expansion.
  • Open Banking And Real-Time Payments Strategy: Prioritize RTP, FedNow, SEPA Instant, and open banking use cases; define roles, partnerships, and economics; capture account-to-account growth and reduce card dependency.

Operations

  • Merchant Onboarding And Activation Operations: Standardize digital boarding, Know Your Customer workflow orchestration, underwriting handoffs, merchant and terminal identifiers provisioning; cut time-to-accept and abandonment while meeting scheme and sponsor requirements.
  • Payments Operations Control Tower And Service Level Management: Stand up real-time control tower monitoring authorization rates, latency, declines, batch health; enforce service level agreements with processors and gateways; reduce outages and service credits.
  • Incident Response And Release Readiness Operations: Build 24×7 incident response, runbooks, communications, and postmortems; coordinate scheme release cutovers and freeze windows; reduce priority-one (P1) duration and change-related defects.
  • Point-Of-Sale Lifecycle And Key Management Operations: Design point-of-sale (POS) lifecycle operations—inventory, key injection, remote updates, certification, decommissioning; increase first-time activation, reduce swap rates, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance risk.
  • Interchange, Scheme Fees, And Reference Data Governance: Govern interchange tables, assessments, bank identification number (BIN) and merchant category code (MCC) data; prevent misrating and billing errors; improve fee accuracy and margin capture.

Procurement & Strategic Sourcing

  • Processor, Gateway, And Acquirer Sourcing: Run RFPs for processors, gateways, acquirers; benchmark pricing, authorization fees, chargeback handling, SLAs; negotiate commercials and incentives; reduce cost per transaction and improve service levels.
  • Scheme Incentives And Network Deal Negotiation: Negotiate Visa, Mastercard, and Amex incentives, marketing funds, and volume commitments; optimize assessments, cross-border pricing, and targets; improve net scheme economics and profitability.
  • BIN Sponsorship And Issuer Processor Sourcing: Source BIN sponsors and issuer processors; run RFPs, due diligence; negotiate setup, per‑card, authorization, and dispute fees; accelerate launch and lower unit economics.
  • Fraud, KYC, And Identity Vendor Rationalization: Consolidate fraud scoring, 3-D Secure servers, device intelligence, sanctions screening, KYC providers; run bake‑offs and tiered pricing; reduce vendor overlap, false positives, and operating cost.
  • Cloud, CDN, And Telecom Spend Optimization: Benchmark and renegotiate cloud, content delivery network, and telecom contracts; optimize reserved instances, data egress, and peering; secure latency SLAs; reduce unit cost per authorization.

Product

  • Product Portfolio Strategy And Roadmap: Define acceptance, payouts, issuing, account to account (A2A) real-time payments, cross-border; size demand, prioritize MVPs, sequence launches; accelerate time-to-market and revenue per merchant.
  • Vertical Solutions And Packaged Offers: Design verticalized packages for marketplaces, SaaS, retail, mobility—onboarding, split payouts, subscriptions, tipping; standardize templates and APIs; increase win rate, activation, and average revenue per user.
  • API, SDK, And Developer Experience Design: Architect REST APIs, webhooks, idempotency, OAuth, SDKs, sandbox, sample apps, and docs; streamline certification; boost developer conversion, time-to-first-transaction, and integration NPS.
  • Cross-Border And FX Product Design: Build cross-border acceptance—local payment methods, local acquiring, multi-currency pricing, FX spreads, settlement options; increase approval rates, reduce cross-border cost, and expand international volume.
  • Installments, Subscriptions, And Tokenization Products: Launch installments and subscriptions with account updater, network tokenization, Click to Pay, wallet enablement; raise authorization rates, reduce churn, and grow conversion and basket size.

Organization

  • Enterprise Operating Model And Spans And Layers: Design global regional operating model, centers of excellence, shared services, and decision rights; optimize spans and layers; accelerate decisions and reduce cost to serve.
  • Product And Engineering Ways Of Working At Scale: Establish agile at scale across issuing, acquiring, risk; define tribes, squads, Objectives and Key Results (OKR) cadences; improve throughput, release quality, and cross-functional alignment.
  • Role Architecture And Capability Framework: Define role families, competencies, leveling, and career paths for product, risk, operations, sales, and engineering; improve hiring quality, mobility, and retention.
  • Incentive Design And Performance Management: Build scorecards and incentives for sales, partnerships, product, risk, and operations; align to volume, approval rate, churn, fraud loss, uptime; drive accountability.
  • Global Workforce And Location Strategy: Design hub and spoke sites, follow the sun coverage, vendor blends, and nearshore models; optimize capacity, continuity, and total cost for payments operations and engineering.

Marketing

  • Brand Positioning And Messaging Architecture: Define differentiated issuer, acquirer, gateway, and account-to-account value propositions; codify messaging and proof points; improve awareness, consideration, and merchant acquisition conversion across priority verticals.
  • Developer Marketing And Community Growth: Build developer marketing for APIs and SDKs—content, tutorials, hackathons, forums; optimize documentation SEO; increase developer signups, time-to-first-transaction, and integration completion rates.
  • Performance Marketing And Conversion Optimization: Design performance marketing—paid search, paid social, SEO, retargeting—and A/B optimize landing pages and sign-up flows; lower customer acquisition cost, raise qualified leads and demo-to-close rates.
  • Partner Co-Marketing With ISVs And Platforms: Plan joint campaigns with independent software vendors (ISVs), marketplaces, and platforms; deploy market development funds (MDF), attribution, and playbooks; grow partner-sourced pipeline and activated merchants.
  • Account-Based Marketing For Enterprise Merchants: Stand up account-based marketing (ABM) for target enterprises; orchestrate 1:1 content, events, and intent data; accelerate sales cycles, expand multi-product adoption, and increase win rates.

Pricing

  • Merchant Pricing Architecture And Packaging: Define MDR structures—blended or interchange plus plus (IC++)—tiers, vertical rate cards, and add-on bundles; align to cost-to-serve; lift take rate and win rate.
  • Deal Desk And Price Governance: Establish guardrails, approval matrices, configure-price-quote workflows, and profitability checks; control discounts, custom surcharges, and incentives; protect margin and shorten quote-to-close.
  • Cross-Border And FX Pricing Strategy: Set cross-border markups, foreign exchange spreads, dynamic currency conversion policies, and local pricing; maximize revenue and competitiveness while meeting scheme and regulatory constraints.
  • Surcharging, Convenience Fee, And Compliance Pricing: Design compliant surcharging and convenience fee programs by jurisdiction and card brand rules; enable dual pricing; increase net yield without fines or chargeback exposure.
  • Partner And Platform Pricing For ISVs And Marketplaces: Structure wholesale rates, buy rates, revenue shares, and residuals; price sub-merchant models and split payouts; grow partner-sourced volume and profitability.

Sales

  • Sales Coverage Model And Territory Design: Design enterprise, mid-market, SMB coverage by vertical and region; allocate named accounts and quotas; optimize hunter/farmer mix; raise pipeline density, quota attainment, and merchant acquisition.
  • Enterprise Pursuit And Deal Acceleration: Stand up pursuit center for merchants, issuers, and payment facilitators (payfacs); run mutual close plans and executive sponsorship; shorten cycles and improve win rates.
  • Partner And Channel Sales Enablement: Build ISV, marketplace, and reseller channel programs; define co-sell motions, certifications, partner portals, and playbooks; grow partner-sourced pipeline, activation, and retained processing volume.
  • Sales Enablement, Playbooks, And Training: Create discovery guides, competitive battlecards, ROI/TCO calculators, demos, and objection handling; deliver onboarding bootcamps; reduce ramp time and increase sales productivity and conversion.
  • Pipeline Governance And Forecast Accuracy: Standardize Salesforce stages, exit criteria, and hygiene; institutionalize deal reviews and qualification; improve forecast accuracy, coverage ratios, and conversion across enterprise, mid‑market, and SMB segments.

Finance

  • Driver-Based FP&A And Forecasting For Payments: Build driver trees linking payment volume, approval rate, take rate, churn, fraud loss, scheme costs; enable scenario forecasting; improve predictability, gross margin, and cash planning.
  • Product And Merchant Unit Economics And Profitability: Model activity-based costs across processing, risk, support, cloud; measure contribution margin by product, corridor, merchant; target remediation actions to lift EBITDA and lifetime value.
  • Revenue Recognition And ASC 606 Compliance For Payments: Define principal versus agent, variable consideration, incentives, chargebacks, FX; codify policies and controls; automate revenue recognition; reduce audit adjustments and restatement risk.
  • Treasury, Settlement Liquidity, And Working Capital: Build 13-week cash forecasts across settlement cycles, reserves, prefunding, collateral; optimize bank structures, sweeping, and FX hedging; lower overdrafts, capital drag, and settlement risk.
  • Revenue Assurance And Leakage Management: Reconcile billed fees to scheme data, interchange rates, and contracts; detect misrating, missing markups, and rounding errors; recover revenue, reduce disputes, and improve gross margin.

AI, Data & Analytics

  • Payments Data Platform And Governance: Build event‑level payments lakehouse, master data management, tokenization, lineage, and data quality; unify authorization, clearing, settlement, and billing data to enable analytics and compliant reporting.
  • Authorization Rate Analytics And Smart Routing Optimization: Analyze issuer declines by BIN, APM, device, geography; design ML routing, retries, network tokens, 3‑D Secure policies; lift approval rates, revenue per transaction, and resiliency.
  • Real-Time Anomaly Detection And Incident Prediction: Build telemetry pipelines and anomaly models on latency, timeouts, declines; predict P1 incidents; trigger runbooks and auto‑mitigations; reduce downtime, service credits, and lost authorization volume.
  • Experimentation And Causal Inference For Checkout: Stand up experimentation platform—randomization, holdouts, sequential tests; apply causal inference to 3DS, tokenization, UI; improve checkout conversion, acceptance, and false‑positive reduction.
  • Merchant Insights And Benchmarking Data Products: Design merchant analytics products—authorization insights, chargeback drivers, cohort trends, benchmarks; build dashboards and APIs; increase differentiation, ARPU, and retention for acquirer and PSP clients.

Transformation

  • Platform Consolidation And Modernization Execution: Consolidate legacy gateways and acquirer stacks; migrate to cloud-native, ISO 20022, microservices; decommission duplicative platforms; improve latency, uptime, and unit cost per authorization.
  • Payfac And Embedded Payments Business Model Transformation: Transition from referral/reseller to registered payfac or payfac-as-a-service; design end-to-end risk, underwriting, settlement, and support; grow take rate and platform monetization.
  • Post-Merger Integration And Synergy Realization: Integrate PSPs and issuer processors—products, contracts, scheme IDs, tech, and teams; execute Day‑1/100 plans; capture revenue synergies and reduce duplicate run cost.
  • Customer Journey And Experience Transformation: Redesign onboarding, checkout, payouts, and disputes journeys; remove friction, automate KYC and tokenization; lift activation, authorization rate, NPS, and lifetime value.
  • Zero-Based Cost And Throughput Transformation: Run zero-based cost across support, disputes, risk ops, and cloud; lean reengineering and automation at scale; reduce cost-to-serve and increase transactions per FTE.

Innovation

  • Venture Studio And New Business Incubation: Incubate embedded finance, pay‑by‑bank, payouts‑as‑a‑service ventures; run discovery, MVPs, and commercialization sprints; accelerate product‑market fit, revenue diversification, and network effects.
  • Real-Time Payments And Open Banking Pilot Factory: Launch Real‑Time Payments (RTP), FedNow, Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Instant, and request‑to‑pay pilots with banks/aggregators; validate economics and acceptance; de‑risk compliant scale‑up.
  • SoftPOS And Contactless Acceptance Innovation: Pilot SoftPOS/tap‑to‑mobile and QR acceptance; certify with schemes; design device strategy and risk controls; grow small and midsize business (SMB) acceptance and cut hardware cost.
  • Tokenization, Passkeys, And Digital Identity Experiments: Test network tokens, Click to Pay, passkeys, and verifiable credentials; quantify conversion, fraud, and strong customer authentication (SCA) impacts; create adoption playbooks by vertical.
  • Stablecoin And Programmable Settlement Sandbox: Pilot USD Coin (USDC) settlement and on‑chain payouts with on/off‑ramps; define Anti‑Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC), treasury, and reconciliation; cut fees and latency.

Compliance

  • AML And Sanctions Compliance Program: Design and operationalize AML/BSA, Know Your Customer, and OFAC sanctions programs—risk assessment, policies, monitoring, model tuning, QA, and training—to reduce regulatory findings and false positives.
  • Licensing And Regulatory Permissions Strategy: Map and obtain money transmitter, e-money, payments institution, and agent registrations; build reporting calendars and controls; accelerate market entry while minimizing licensing gaps and penalties.
  • Card Network And Scheme Compliance Management: Implement Visa/Mastercard/Amex scheme rule governance, agent/ISO oversight, excessive chargeback programs, PCI PIN, registration; reduce fines, assessments, and sponsor bank escalations.
  • PCI DSS And Data Privacy Governance: Scope and govern PCI DSS ROC/SAQ, tokenization, and GDPR/CCPA privacy—data mapping, DPIAs, retention, vendor oversight—lower breach exposure, compliance cost, and attestation issues.
  • Regulatory Change Management And Exam Readiness: Stand up horizon scanning, control mapping, evidence repositories, and mock exams for CFPB, state, FCA, MAS; drive timely implementation and reduce exam deficiencies.

Program & Portfolio Management

  • Enterprise PMO And Stage Gate Governance: Stand up payments PMO with stage gates, RAIDs, change control, and scheme calendars; deliver issuing, acquiring, RTP, and payouts programs on time, on budget.
  • Portfolio Prioritization And Sequencing: Prioritize initiatives by revenue, approval-rate lift, risk, and regulatory deadlines; sequence roadmaps across product, engineering, risk, and operations; maximize ROI and minimize context switching.
  • Resource And Capacity Planning: Build portfolio capacity models across squads and vendors; scenario-plan staffing and funding; improve throughput, hit release dates, and reduce bottlenecks across payments programs.
  • Benefits Realization And KPI Tracking: Define business cases, baselines, and KPIs—authorization rate, latency, conversion, uptime, cost-to-serve; instrument dashboards; lock in realized benefits and executive accountability.
  • Regulatory And Scheme Change Delivery Office: Orchestrate PCI DSS v4.0, PSD2 strong customer authentication (SCA), tokenization, ISO 20022, network mandates; manage dependencies, testing, cutovers; avoid fines and service disruption.

Information Technology

  • Payments Platform Architecture And Cloud Migration: Design cloud-native acquiring/issuing architecture—microservices, Kubernetes, service mesh, active-active, ISO interfaces; migrate workloads; reduce authorization latency, improve uptime, scalability, and unit cost.
  • API Gateway And Developer Platform Enablement: Deploy API gateway, OAuth 2.0, mTLS, rate limiting, webhook signing and retries; build developer portal, sandbox, versioning; accelerate partner integrations and improve security.
  • Event Streaming And ISO Message Orchestration: Implement Kafka event streaming, idempotency, exactly-once processing; orchestrate ISO 8583 and ISO 20022 flows across authorization, clearing, settlement; enable real-time processing and downstream analytics.
  • Site Reliability Engineering And Observability: Establish SLOs, error budgets, golden signals; implement OpenTelemetry tracing, logs, metrics, synthetic monitoring, canary releases; reduce P1 incidents, mean time to detect and recover.
  • Resiliency, Disaster Recovery, And Chaos Engineering: Architect multi-region active-active, circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries, timeouts; run DR exercises and chaos experiments; meet scheme SLAs, RTO/RPO, and regulatory resiliency expectations.

Risk & Fraud Management

  • Merchant Underwriting And Risk Segmentation: Define KYB/KYC, bank account verification, business model risk tiers, limits, and rolling reserve triggers; reduce losses and onboarding friction while meeting sponsor bank expectations.
  • Transaction Fraud Models And Policy Optimization: Design layered rules and machine learning, behavioral biometrics, device fingerprinting, and negative lists; cut fraud loss and false declines while preserving authorization rates.
  • 3DS And SCA Risk Orchestration: Orchestrate EMV 3‑D Secure, step‑up flows, and PSD2/UK strong customer authentication (SCA) exemptions (TRA, low‑value, whitelisting); improve conversion, liability shift, and approval rates across markets.
  • Card Testing, Account Takeover, And Bot Attack Defense: Build real‑time detection for card testing, account takeover (ATO), and enumeration; integrate web application firewall (WAF), rate limiting, and CAPTCHA; reduce authorization storms, scheme penalties, and losses.
  • Portfolio Surveillance And Exposure Management: Monitor merchant chargeback and fraud ratios, negative trends, and Automated Clearing House (ACH)/Real‑Time Payments (RTP) return rates; set dynamic reserves, caps, and terminations; prevent sponsor escalations and catastrophic loss.

Clearing & Settlement

  • Clearing Reconciliation And Break Management: Map scheme clearing files, alternative payment methods (APMs) reports, bank statements; automate reconciliation to authorizations and billing; codify root causes; reduce breaks, write-offs, revenue leakage.
  • Settlement Calendar And Scheme Optimization: Design scheme settlement calendars, cutoffs, and netting; align funding windows to Visa, Mastercard, and Amex cycles; reduce float, fees, and service disruptions.
  • Multi-Currency Settlement And FX Execution Design: Architect settlement currencies, on-us netting, cross-border flows, and foreign exchange (FX) execution; optimize spreads, nostro usage, and providers; lower FX cost and improve payout optionality.
  • Merchant Payouts And Funding Model Design: Design payout schedules, faster funding, real-time payout options, returns handling, and reserve policies; balance merchant experience with liquidity risk, sponsor constraints, and operational capacity.
  • Payfac Split Settlement And Marketplace Flows: Engineer payment facilitator (payfac) and marketplace fund flows—split payouts, escrow, tax withholding, and sub-merchant reserves; codify controls and disclosures; increase compliance, scalability, and partner satisfaction.

Disputes & Chargebacks

  • Chargeback Operating Model And Workflow Design: Build end‑to‑end disputes operations—intake, triage, evidence assembly, submission, SLAs, QA—using MasterCom and Visa Resolve Online; raise representment win rate and reduce write‑offs.
  • Reason Code Analytics And Evidence Playbooks: Analyze reason codes and loss drivers; build compelling evidence templates, rebuttals, and data feeds; improve representment quality, cycle time, and fee recovery.
  • Pre-Dispute Alerts And Deflection Strategy: Implement Verifi Order Insight and Rapid Dispute Resolution, Ethoca Alerts, and auto‑refund decisioning; deflect disputes, lower chargeback ratios, and avoid scheme program enrollment.
  • Descriptor, Policy, And Checkout Optimization For Dispute Prevention: Optimize billing descriptors, receipts, cancellation policies, confirmation emails, and post‑purchase support; deploy 3‑D Secure strategically; cut friendly fraud and unnecessary chargebacks.
  • Scheme Program Compliance And Ratio Remediation: Govern Visa Dispute Monitoring Program and Mastercard Excessive Chargeback Program thresholds; design remediation plans; reduce assessments, penalties, and sponsor bank escalations.

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Find a consultant in our Payments & Networks Practice

Prefer email? Write to [email protected]

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