The global payments landscape is currently undergoing a structural shift characterized by unprecedented complexity in scheme fee architectures and intensifying margin pressure. In a strategic move to address these systemic challenges, payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory firm SRM have announced a formal partnership to launch the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution. This joint offering is designed to provide financial institutions with a robust framework for transaction-level scheme fee assurance, automated reconciliation, and granular merchant profitability analytics. By digitizing and automating processes that have historically relied on manual intervention, the partnership aims to help acquirers recover billions of dollars in revenue leakage while simultaneously addressing rising operational costs and heightened regulatory scrutiny.
The Evolution of the Acquiring Business Model
For decades, the merchant acquiring business functioned on relatively stable and predictable interchange and scheme fee models. However, the last several years have seen a radical transformation. As card networks have introduced more tiered pricing, specialized service fees, and complex cross-border assessment structures, the traditional manual reconciliation methods—often managed through spreadsheets and aggregated reporting—have become increasingly obsolete.
This technological debt has created a significant "profit leakage" phenomenon. Acquirers often find themselves unable to accurately pass through costs or identify discrepancies between the fees billed by schemes and the fees recovered from merchants. As operational costs continue to climb in response to inflation and the need for digital modernization, the margin compression experienced by acquirers has become a top-tier boardroom concern. The SRM/Torus collaboration arrives at a critical juncture, offering a technological remedy to a problem that has historically been considered a cost of doing business.
Chronology and Development of the Partnership
The foundation for this collaboration was laid over several years as both firms deepened their footprint in the fintech and banking sectors. Torus, founded in 2021 and headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, quickly gained traction by focusing on the intersection of data science and payment profitability. Their appearance at FinovateEurope 2025 in London served as a catalyst for broader industry recognition, where the company showcased its SaaS intelligence platform’s ability to reconcile complex transaction flows and optimize pricing at the unit level.
Parallel to this, SRM—an international advisory and execution firm—has been actively working to modernize the infrastructure of financial institutions. After making its debut at FinovateFall 2023, SRM focused on broader strategic consulting, including digital transformation and core processing. Recognizing that their clients were struggling with the nuances of scheme fee management, SRM sought a technology partner that could provide the granular data visibility necessary to execute on their advisory strategies. The resulting SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution is the culmination of this strategic alignment, moving from theoretical advisory to tangible, data-driven execution.
The Mechanics of Profitability Recovery
The SRM/Torus solution is built on three core pillars: automated scheme fee assurance, daily reconciliation, and merchant-level profitability analytics. Unlike traditional reporting systems that look at aggregate monthly data, this platform operates at the transaction level.
- Automated Fee Assurance: The system automatically calculates interchange and scheme fees, ensuring that the amounts billed to merchants accurately reflect the actual costs incurred by the acquirer. This eliminates the "human error" factor that often leads to under-recovery of fees.
- Daily Reconciliation: By performing daily comparisons between scheme settlement files and merchant settlement files, the platform provides a near-real-time dashboard of discrepancies. This visibility allows financial institutions to identify and rectify billing errors within 24 hours, rather than waiting for the end of a monthly cycle.
- Profitability Analytics: By aggregating data across portfolios and merchant segments, the platform empowers acquirers to make evidence-based pricing decisions. It allows teams to see which merchant segments are driving the highest margins and which are being eroded by excessive fee structures or inefficient processing costs.
Supporting Data and Financial Impact
The economic case for this technological intervention is compelling. According to internal data provided by the companies, a mid-sized European acquirer utilizing the technology was able to improve its annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million. This figure represents approximately 10% of their total annual scheme fee costs, a significant bottom-line impact in an industry where net margins are often razor-thin.
Furthermore, a comprehensive white paper released by SRM, titled "Transforming Acquirer Profitability," provides a macro view of the opportunity at stake. The analysis suggests that across the global market, acquirers could potentially recover $1 billion in operational costs over the next five years simply by automating fee management. Beyond cost recovery, the potential for revenue optimization is even higher. Estimates suggest that by leveraging accurate, transparent data oversight, the industry could realize between $3 billion and $5.5 billion in additional fee revenue. This revenue is currently "lost" to discrepancies that are either too difficult to identify or too costly to reconcile under existing manual frameworks.
Perspectives from Leadership
The strategic intent behind this partnership is framed by a shared recognition that the status quo is no longer viable. Kirill Lisitsyn, CEO of Torus, highlighted that the primary challenge facing the industry is "hidden profit leakage." By integrating SRM’s deep advisory expertise—which helps banks understand the "why" and "how" of their commercial strategies—with Torus’s technical platform, the companies believe they have created a holistic solution that bridges the gap between strategy and execution.
John Berns, Managing Partner at SRM Europe, emphasized the shift in the fundamental economics of acquiring. "The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed," Berns stated. "Growing scheme fee complexity means that traditional reconciliation processes are no longer sufficient." From his perspective, the partnership is not merely about software implementation; it is about providing financial institutions with the decision-making tools necessary to remain competitive in an environment where speed and precision are paramount.
Broader Implications for the Payments Industry
The partnership between SRM and Torus underscores a wider trend in financial technology: the transition from "broad" banking platforms to "specialized" intelligence layers. As the payments ecosystem becomes more fragmented, the value proposition of financial institutions is increasingly determined by their ability to manage data.
For regulators, the increased transparency promised by this technology could also have downstream benefits. As authorities across the EU and North America continue to pressure the industry for greater transparency in fee structures, the ability of acquirers to provide clear, granular, and defensible billing data will be an essential component of regulatory compliance.
Furthermore, this solution sets a new benchmark for what financial institutions should expect from their internal operations. As more acquirers adopt similar high-precision, transaction-level management systems, the "manual processing" model will likely face extinction. The firms that prioritize this level of operational transparency are expected to have a significant competitive advantage in pricing, client retention, and long-term financial resilience.
As the industry looks toward the next five years, the success of the SRM/Torus solution will serve as a bellwether for how effectively the acquiring sector can adapt to the "new normal" of payment complexity. If the projected $4 billion to $6.5 billion in industry-wide recovery potential is realized, this partnership may well be remembered as a pivotal moment in the professionalization of payment scheme fee management.
