How Cleverbridge Gained Cost Transparency and Margin Control with AI Payments Intelligence

Executive Summary

As Cleverbridge expanded its global payment footprint, understanding true payment costs became increasingly complex. Working with multiple PSPs meant interchange and scheme fees are complex to manage and monitor, making accurate cost allocation and margin analysis difficult.

By implementing AI Payments Intelligence, Cleverbridge used IXOPAY’s fee allocation engine to correctly allocate interchange and scheme fees at a transactional level, unify reporting across four PSPs, and feed clean, structured data both by using ready to use dashboards and a data synchronization to Snowflake to enrich the data with internal data sources. This enabled clearer cost transparency, improved profitability analysis, and stronger control over pricing decisions.

The Challenge: Complexity in tracking costs and fees

Cleverbridge operated across multiple PSPs, each with its own reporting formats, fee structures, and levels of detail.

Key challenges included:

• Interchange and scheme fees reported differently by each PSP
  

• Fees aggregated in bulks rather than per transaction
  

• Limited ability to trace cost drivers back to individual payments
  

• Manual effort required to reconcile and normalize fee data
  

• Difficulty understanding how payment costs impacted margins and pricing
  

While data existed, it lacked the structure and logic required for accurate financial analysis.

The Solution: Transaction-Level Fee Allocation with Built-In Logic

Cleverbridge implemented AI Payments Intelligence to bring consistency and structure to payment cost data.

At the core of the solution was IXOPAY’s fee allocation engine, designed to:

• Apply predefined logic to correctly allocate interchange and scheme fees
  

• Distribute aggregated PSP fees down to the transaction level
  

• Normalize fee structures across different PSPs
  

• Create consistent, comparable cost data across regions and providers
  

How it worked in practice:

• No-code data ingestion
  Over 50 raw files per day from multiple PSPs were automatically ingested without manual data mapping.
  

• Structured and harmonized data model
  Payment, settlement, and fee data were unified into standardized tables.
  

• Snowflake integration
  Clean, allocation-ready data was delivered directly into Cleverbridge’s Snowflake environment, enabling internal BI teams to analyze margins, pricing, and cost structures with confidence.
  

The AI-powered intelligence layer ensured the process scaled reliably, while the fee allocation logic ensured accuracy.

The Impact: Accurate Cost Intelligence and Stronger Margin Control

With transaction-level fee allocation in place, Cleverbridge gained meaningful control over its payment economics, resulting in:

• Cost Optimization Opportunities: Identified clear, transaction-level visibility into all payment fee components. Through standardized fee categorization, they surfaced accurate, comparable cost data across multiple PSPs to unlock more than $100k of optimization opportunities in costs and fees management.
  

• Improved Profitability Analysis: Gained the ability to pinpoint exactly where payment costs impacted margins at a granular level, ensuring every transaction was accounted for in the bottom line.
  

• Stronger pricing control
  Better-informed pricing decisions applied to customers based on real cost insights.
  

• Operational efficiency
  Reduced manual reconciliation and ongoing data pipeline maintenance, resulting in more than 40 hours/months freed from manual operational work.
  

• Scalable Financial Intelligence: Established a setup that supports growth without increasing analytical complexity—deploying a sophisticated intelligence layer immediately instead of a potential 12-month internal build with all the associated operational efforts.

Why This Approach Worked

Traditional PSP reports show what was charged.
The fee allocation engine shows why costs occur and where they apply.

For Cleverbridge, the value came from:

• Correct fee allocation at transaction level
  

• Consistent cost logic across providers
  

• Data structured for financial decision-making, not just reporting
  

Key Takeaways

• Interchange, scheme fees, and provider fees require transaction-level allocation to be understood correctly
  

• Consistent fee logic is essential when working with multiple PSPs
  

• Automation removes manual effort, but allocation logic ensures accuracy
  

• Clear cost intelligence enables better margin and pricing decisions