You manage your software.
We manage your payments.
PaymentsOffice is the team, not the technology — a vendor-agnostic outsourced operating function that runs your payments stack on top of whatever providers you already use. We improve both the structure of your stack — how it's set up and who you partner with — and the day-to-day performance of what flows through it. The expertise of a fully-staffed payments team, without having to build one.
Designed for ISVs outgrowing PayFac-as-a-Service or stuck on referral economics.
Most ISVs leave significant payments margin on the table.
Most ISVs leave 30–100 basis points of payments margin on the table. It comes from two completely different places.
of available spread going to your payments provider — not you.
You capture too small a slice of the spread.
Every card transaction carries a baseline cost — money that goes to issuers and card networks, the same for everyone. The margin above that baseline gets divided between you and your payments provider, and how much you capture depends entirely on your operating model. Referral ISVs get 5–15 bps; Registered PayFacs at scale can capture 80–150+ bps. Most ISVs sit somewhere in the middle — the rest going to their payments provider.
leaking from portfolio operations, day in and day out.
Your operations bleed margin you should be keeping.
Independent of operating model, every portfolio loses margin to suboptimal authorization rates, fraud losses, interchange downgrades, and dispute outcomes. These are P&L line items captured on existing volume — no business-model change required to fix them.
A double-click on each one.
Toggle below to see what each opportunity actually is, and roughly how much margin you can recover from each.
Every card transaction has two layers of cost. The first (≈1.95% on average) goes to issuers and card networks — money that nobody on your side gets to keep, no matter who's running the payments stack. Above that baseline sits the margin — the part that gets divided between you and your payments provider. How much you capture depends entirely on your operating model. Most ISVs sit somewhere in the middle today; moving up one or two stages typically captures 10–60 bps of additional margin (or significantly more if you go all the way to PayFac, where you hold the registration yourself and capture the full spread).
Referral residual. Provider does everything.
Branded experience. Partner runs the engine.
You run a payments business on PFaaS infrastructure.
You're the PayFac of record. Full spread, full responsibility.
Independent of operating model, every portfolio leaks margin to suboptimal operations. The levers below each show what's individually achievable on a problem portfolio. Results vary significantly by industry and merchant mix — high-risk, CNP-heavy, and subscription-recovery portfolios see the largest gains; well-run retail sees less. Combined, you typically realize 20–40 bps in practice — not every lever maxes out simultaneously due to overlap and diminishing returns.
Higher approval rates on existing volume via cross-issuer routing, network tokens, and decline-reason analysis.
Loss reduction and fewer false declines through dynamic rules and case-by-case tuning.
Better evidence packaging and higher representment win rates on chargebacks.
Downgrade reduction and routing to lowest-cost interchange categories.
Recovery through smarter retries, account-updater coverage, and dunning communications.
Settlement-cycle and reserve management — direct P&L impact on float and working capital.
How you access both: greater control of your payments stack.
Both opportunities — capturing more of the structural spread and lifting performance on existing volume — get easier as you move right along this spectrum. More control means more levers. But more control also means more risk and more operational burden — which is exactly where PaymentsOffice fits.
Sacrifice High
Introduce merchants to a payments provider via a referral link or simple integration. Collect a residual on processed volume. No portfolio ownership, no branding.
Everything. Underwriting, settlement, support, the merchant relationship, and all the risk. The provider is the FSP of record.
Sacrifice High
Embed payments inside your product with your brand on the checkout, your dashboard, your portfolio reporting. You sit between the merchant and the provider.
Owns underwriting, registration, settlement, risk, dispute decisions, and merchant data. Provider is still FSP of record.
Sacrifice Medium
Set merchant pricing. See transaction-level data. Influence underwriting and dispute decisions. Operate as a payments business on PFaaS infrastructure.
Holds the Visa/Mastercard registration. Runs core infrastructure. Handles the bulk of the underwriting work. Compliance backbone (BSA/AML, PCI).
Sacrifice Low
Become the PayFac of record. Hold Visa/Mastercard registration and the sponsor-bank relationship. Own underwriting, risk, compliance, and ops — capturing the full spread.
There is no provider above you. You stack a sponsor bank, a processor (FIS, Fiserv, TSYS), and network connectivity directly.
We help you capture maximum value from your payment operations.
By maturing and managing your payments stack — capturing more margin from existing operations, and lifting performance to capture more on top. As true for ISVs already at PayFac-as-a-Service or Registered PayFac scale as for those still on the journey there.
Underwriting & KYC
Decisioning support, KYB on entities, KYC on principals, OFAC and MATCH screening, ongoing monitoring. The boarding pipeline you'd otherwise have to build.
Risk & Compliance
Portfolio surveillance, PCI Level 1 support, BSA/AML and OFAC obligations, network-rules monitoring. The compliance line you'd otherwise have to hire.
Network Registration
Visa and Mastercard registration management, sponsor bank relationships, processor agreements. The payments infrastructure you can't run alone.
Authorization Optimization
Auth rate improvement across your merchant book. Cross-issuer routing, network token penetration, decline-reason analysis at portfolio scale.
Fraud & Disputes
Loss reduction, false-decline tuning, dispute case prep, representment, chargeback management. The operations the processor used to handle.
Cost & Treasury
Interchange optimization, rate compression, settlement-cycle and reserves management. Turning spread capture into recurring P&L impact.
Not software. A staffed payments team.
Other payments providers give you APIs, dashboards, and documentation — and ask you to run the team yourself. PaymentsOffice gives you the team. Senior expertise that's normally impossible to hire fractionally, organized in tiers so the daily work gets done and the hard decisions get the right person on them.
Everything reported monthly. Built on processor data, validated against external sources, delivered the same way every month. The view your finance team uses to know the payments operation is being run well.
Senior payments leadership across both pillars of the opportunity, available fractionally — the kind of expertise that's normally impossible to hire part-time. They own the policy and the playbook; analysts execute against it.
Fifteen years of underwriting leadership at top-tier US payfacs. Built risk policy and decisioning frameworks that scaled sub-merchant volumes from $50M to $5B. Former Head of Risk at a major fintech sponsor.
Former Chief Compliance Officer at a Tier-1 issuer. Specialty: BSA/AML programs, PCI Level 1 frameworks, and the operating cadence that keeps you out of trouble with regulators and networks.
Twenty years across sponsor-bank relationships and processor commercial agreements. Negotiates partnership terms that other ISVs don't even know are on the table.
Two decades across acquirer and PSP commercial roles, negotiating pricing for some of the largest merchant portfolios in North America. Reads processor master service agreements the way other people read fiction.
Former senior product lead at a Tier-1 issuer, where he built the rules engines that decide who gets approved and who gets declined. Knows what makes an issuing bank say yes.
Twenty years of dispute operations across travel, retail, and digital goods. Designed representment strategies that took win rates from the mid-twenties into the sixties. Verifi and Ethoca alumnus.
Three tiers of analysts execute the SME playbook day-to-day. Assigned per client, not per capability — they know your portfolio, your merchants, and the patterns that matter for your business.
Owns your engagement. Leads delivery. Escalates to SMEs on policy questions and edge cases.
Runs the monthly Ledger cadence and portfolio operations on your merchant book.
Queue work, routine reviews, ticket handling, daily checks across the book.
Want to see what this could mean for your business?
The first conversation is a payments diagnostic — thirty minutes, no slides. Tell us where you are and where you'd like to be; we'll come back with what we'd want to look at first.