Four places your payments leak money. Price them in two minutes.

An 84% approval rate. What happened to the other 16%?

Some of that 16% was never going to convert. Expired cards, genuine fraud, customers who changed their mind at the last second. 

The rest is the part worth knowing about: soft declines that a retry, a different route or an updated card would have recovered. It’s what is called revenue leakage. Most teams cannot separate the two, because an approval rate is a single average and the reasons sit underneath it in decline codes nobody has time to read.

Approvals are also only one of the places payment performance leaks.

Blended fees drift upward as your mix shifts between providers, schemes and corridors. Disputes turn into chargebacks when they could have been resolved days earlier. And every month your team loses days to assembling reports rather than acting on what is in them. None of this shows up in an approval rate, and most companies never put a figure on any of it.

The reason is rarely a lack of data. It is that the data sits in multiple PSP dashboards, settlement files, a dispute portal and endless spreadsheets, which is why nobody has ever put a number on it—until now. 

Discover your annual ROI from payments in just two minutes using six figures you likely already have on hand.

Two minutes, six numbers you already know

The calculator works out what all four of those are worth to you over a year. It asks for six figures a payments lead usually knows without looking them up: your monthly attempted volume, average transaction value, current approval rate, blended payment fees, chargeback rate, and the size of your payments team.

Enter them and you get an annual value, split into four lines:

• Approved volume you are currently losing

• Fee load you are overpaying

• Dispute fees you never needed to pay

• Hours spent assembling reports instead of acting on them

Nothing to install, nothing to send us, and it runs entirely in your browser.

What it looks like for a merchant processing $10m a month

Take a mid-sized merchant processing $10m a month, with an 84% approval rate, blended fees of 300 bps, a chargeback rate of 30 bps, and three people who each spend about a day a week pulling payment reports together. There is nothing unusual about any of those numbers.

On its most conservative setting, the calculator returns roughly $284,000 a year, made up of:

• Payment fees: $151,000

• Approval recovery: $108,000

• Team time: $17,500

• Dispute fees: $7,600

What the number leaves out

Of course, ROI calculators can’t factor in everything, such as involuntary churn or marketing spend wasted on customers whose payment failed. Or it could be the lifetime value of a subscriber lost to a decline nobody retried.

Those are real, and they are not in the figure you just generated, which means your actual exposure is higher than what the calculator told you.

Take it to your CFO

Need hard evidence to hand to your CFO? Add your company name, and the calculator produces a report with your figures, ready to forward.

Want to understand how you can boost your ROI? Our Payments Intelligence solution can help you surface insights faster with built-in conversational AI. Just ask your payment question and it tells you what to do next. 

Learn more about how to improve authorizations, reduce fees, increase margins, and avoid chargebacks before they happen. 

Book a demo with one of our payment experts to discover how you can reduce revenue leakage and maximize your payments ROI.