In a move set to reshape the financial landscape for merchant acquirers, payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory firm SRM have announced a strategic partnership aimed at recovering billions of dollars in lost revenue. The collaboration introduces a specialized joint offering, the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution, designed to provide merchant acquirers with unprecedented transparency into fee structures and transaction-level data. This initiative arrives at a critical juncture for the payments industry, as financial institutions grapple with tightening margins, escalating operational costs, and the increasing complexity of global card scheme fee structures.
The new solution integrates Torus’s advanced transaction-level analytics engine with SRM’s extensive advisory expertise, offering a comprehensive toolkit for fee assurance, automated reconciliation, and merchant-level profitability analysis. By addressing the "hidden profit leakage" that plagues the merchant acquiring sector, the partnership seeks to restore financial equilibrium to institutions that have long struggled with opaque billing processes and manual oversight.
Bridging the Gap in Scheme Fee Management
For decades, the relationship between merchant acquirers and card schemes such as Visa and Mastercard has been defined by a labyrinth of interchange fees, processing costs, and assessments. As digital payment volumes surge globally, the complexity of these fee structures has scaled exponentially. Traditional methods of managing these costs often rely on aggregated data and manual reconciliation, a process that is increasingly prone to error and oversight.
The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution is engineered to eliminate these inefficiencies. At its core, the platform provides automated, transaction-level scheme fee assurance. This means that every single transaction processed by an acquirer is verified against the specific fee mandates of the card schemes. By automating this calculation and recovery process, the solution minimizes revenue leakage—where acquirers inadvertently pay more in fees than they recover from their merchants—and ensures that billing accuracy is maintained across the entire portfolio.
Furthermore, the offering facilitates daily transaction-level reconciliation between scheme reports and merchant settlement files. This granular visibility allows financial institutions to identify discrepancies in real-time, enhancing financial controls and providing a robust audit trail for regulatory compliance.
The Rising Complexity of the Global Payments Ecosystem
The partnership between Torus and SRM is a direct response to fundamental shifts in the economics of the acquiring industry. Historically, merchant acquiring was a high-margin business characterized by relatively stable fee structures. However, several factors have converged to create a more volatile environment.
First, card schemes now update their pricing and rulesets with increasing frequency, often twice a year. These updates can include hundreds of distinct changes to how fees are calculated based on geography, merchant category, transaction type, and security protocols (such as 3-D Secure). For many acquirers, keeping pace with these changes using legacy systems is nearly impossible.
Second, the industry is facing significant margin compression. The rise of fintech disruptors and the commoditization of basic processing services have forced traditional acquirers to lower their prices to remain competitive. In such a low-margin environment, even a minor discrepancy in fee recovery can represent the difference between a profitable merchant relationship and a loss-making one.
John Berns, Managing Partner of SRM Europe, emphasized this shift, noting that traditional reconciliation processes are no longer sufficient to protect the bottom line. "The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed," Berns stated. "Financial institutions need transaction-level visibility to understand where revenue is being lost, ensure fees are accurately recovered, and make better commercial decisions."
Economic Projections and the Transforming Acquirer Profitability White Paper
The launch of the joint solution is supported by a new white paper from SRM titled "Transforming Acquirer Profitability." The report provides a sobering look at the current state of the industry, highlighting the flaws in traditional scheme fee management. According to SRM’s analysis, the reliance on manual processes and aggregated reporting not only requires significant operational effort but also masks substantial financial losses.
The economic analysis presented in the white paper suggests that the stakes are incredibly high. SRM estimates that global acquirers could recover approximately $1 billion in operational costs over the next five years by implementing automated, data-driven reconciliation tools. More significantly, the report posits that between $3 billion and $5.5 billion in additional fee revenue could be realized through more accurate and transparent oversight of transaction data.
These figures are not merely theoretical. Torus and SRM highlighted a case study involving a mid-sized European acquirer that integrated the Torus technology. The institution was able to improve its annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million, which represented approximately 10% of its total scheme fee costs. For a large-scale global acquirer, the potential for recovery scales into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Technical Breakdown: From Data to Actionable Intelligence
The SRM/Torus solution distinguishes itself by moving beyond simple reporting to provide actionable commercial intelligence. The platform’s profitability analysis features allow acquirers to view performance across various dimensions, including individual merchants, specific portfolios, and broader market segments.
- Merchant-Level Profitability: By accurately allocating every cent of scheme fees and interchange to the specific transaction that generated it, acquirers can see the true net margin of every merchant. This prevents the "subsidization" effect, where profitable merchants unknowingly cover the losses incurred by mispriced high-volume clients.
- Pricing Governance: With a clear view of costs, management can implement stronger pricing governance. This ensures that new contracts are structured to protect margins and that existing contracts are adjusted when card schemes increase their underlying fees.
- Automated Recovery: The system identifies instances of "under-recovery," where the merchant was billed less than the cost incurred by the acquirer, and "over-recovery," which can pose a regulatory and reputational risk.
Kirill Lisitsyn, CEO of Torus, highlighted the impact of these capabilities: "Our customers are already demonstrating that significant improvements in profitability can be achieved through better fee assurance, stronger pricing governance, and automated analytics."
Institutional Background and Chronology of Innovation
The partnership brings together two entities with deep roots in the fintech and advisory sectors.
Torus, headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, was founded in 2021 with a specific mission: to provide a SaaS intelligence platform that enables banks and fintechs to optimize their card transaction profits. Despite its relatively recent entry into the market, the company has quickly gained traction, claiming that its technology can boost profits on card transactions by up to 50%. Torus most recently showcased its latest technological advancements at FinovateEurope 2025 in London, where it demonstrated its ability to reconcile complex transaction flows in real-time.
SRM (Strategic Resource Management) serves as the advisory powerhouse in this partnership. With a global footprint, SRM has spent decades helping financial institutions optimize their vendor relationships and operational efficiencies. The firm made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023, positioning itself as a leader in payments modernization, digital transformation, and core processing optimization. SRM’s role in the partnership involves providing the strategic framework and execution expertise necessary to integrate Torus’s data into an institution’s broader business strategy.
Strategic Implications for the Future of Financial Institutions
The collaboration between Torus and SRM reflects a broader trend toward "Precision Finance." As the "easy" gains from digital adoption begin to plateau, financial institutions are turning toward hyper-optimization to drive growth. In the merchant acquiring space, this means moving away from "good enough" estimates toward "cent-perfect" accuracy.
The implications extend beyond immediate profit recovery. Greater transparency in fee management also aligns with increasing regulatory scrutiny. In many jurisdictions, regulators are demanding more clarity in how fees are disclosed and passed through to merchants. Acquirers who can demonstrate rigorous, automated control over their fee structures will be better positioned to navigate the evolving compliance landscape.
Furthermore, the ability to accurately analyze merchant segments allows acquirers to refine their sales strategies. Institutions can identify which industries or transaction types are most profitable and tailor their business development efforts accordingly. This data-driven approach transforms the back-office function of reconciliation into a front-office driver of commercial performance.
As the global payments market continues to expand—with projections suggesting total transaction values will reach record highs by 2030—the gap between those who manage their data with precision and those who rely on legacy methods will only widen. The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution enters the market as a vital tool for institutions seeking to bridge that gap and secure their financial future in an increasingly complex ecosystem.
