The landscape of merchant acquiring is undergoing a profound structural transformation, driven by mounting operational pressures, margin compression, and increasingly complex card scheme fee architectures. To combat these mounting economic challenges, payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory powerhouse SRM have announced a strategic partnership. The two companies have formally rolled out a joint offering called the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution, designed to help merchant acquirers recover billions of dollars in lost revenue through granular transaction-level fee transparency, automated reconciliation, and advanced merchant profitability analytics.
The collaboration brings together Torus’s cutting-edge SaaS intelligence platform—which specializes in payment profitability and scheme fee optimization—with SRM’s extensive advisory expertise in digital transformation, payments infrastructure, and operational efficiency for financial institutions. By bridging the gap between high-level advisory insights and deep-dive technical data analytics, the partnership aims to solve one of the most persistent and hidden profit leakage problems plaguing the modern payments ecosystem.
An Industry at a Crossroads: The Growing Complexities of Card Scheme Fees
For decades, merchant acquirers operated within a relatively straightforward commercial framework. Transaction volumes grew steadily, interchange fees were predictable, and traditional aggregated reporting systems were deemed sufficient for tracking financial performance. However, the contemporary payments environment bears little resemblance to the past. Card networks have continuously updated and expanded their fee structures, introducing a labyrinth of variable surcharges, assessment fees, cross-border levies, and compliance-related costs.
These intricate fee schedules change frequently, often multiple times a year, leaving acquirers struggling to keep pace. Many financial institutions and payment processors continue to rely on legacy back-office systems, manual spreadsheets, and aggregated reporting tools. These traditional methods lack the resolution needed to trace costs down to the individual transaction level. Consequently, acquirers frequently fail to capture the true cost of servicing specific merchant portfolios, leading to widespread under-recovery of scheme fees, margin erosion, and silent revenue leakage that can severely depress net profitability.
The launch of the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution arrives at a critical juncture for the industry. Alongside the product rollout, SRM published a comprehensive white paper titled Transforming Acquirer Profitability. The report examines the root causes of current commercial pressures and delivers a damning critique of traditional scheme fee management practices. It highlights how legacy operational approaches demand immense manual effort while offering minimal visibility, leaving vast sums of capital trapped in unrecovered fees and mispriced merchant agreements.
Core Capabilities and Technical Architecture of the Joint Solution
The newly introduced SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution has been engineered from the ground up to address these systemic vulnerabilities. By integrating Torus’s algorithmic transaction-level intelligence directly into SRM’s operational advisory frameworks, the platform delivers a multi-layered suite of capabilities designed to optimize financial performance across the entire acquiring lifecycle.
At the core of the offering is automated interchange and scheme fee assurance. The platform executes merchant-level calculations and recovery processes automatically, drastically reducing the margin for human error and plugging revenue leaks before they compound. By shifting from manual spot-checks to continuous, automated oversight, financial institutions can achieve unprecedented billing accuracy.
Another pillar of the solution is daily transaction-level reconciliation. The platform matches data between card schemes and merchant settlement files on a daily basis. This high-frequency reconciliation grants acquirers absolute visibility into discrepancies, payment mismatches, and clearing anomalies, thereby reinforcing internal financial controls and risk management protocols.
Furthermore, the solution incorporates robust daily profitability analytics. Acquirers gain a holistic view of financial performance spanning individual merchants, entire merchant portfolios, and broad market segments. This granular insight empowers commercial teams to make data-backed pricing decisions, refine merchant tiering, optimize interchange pass-through models, and elevate executive management reporting to a level of precision previously unattainable with legacy systems.
Quantifying the Impact: Billions in Recoverable Capital
The financial implications of transitioning from legacy reporting to transaction-level profitability intelligence are staggering. According to economic analysis featured in SRM’s new white paper, the implementation of advanced fee assurance and reconciliation technology could unlock up to $1 billion in direct operational cost savings over the next five years. More significantly, the accurate identification and recovery of missed fees could realize an additional $3 billion to $5.5 billion in top-line fee revenue across the global acquiring sector.
Real-world deployments of the underlying technology validate these projections. Early adopters of the Torus platform are already demonstrating substantial financial gains. For instance, a mid-sized European merchant acquirer utilizing the technology successfully boosted its annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million. This single improvement accounted for approximately 10% of the institution’s total annual scheme fee expenditures, underscoring how quickly such digital tools can pay for themselves.
Leadership Perspectives on the Strategic Alliance
Industry executives from both participating organizations have emphasized the urgency of modernizing acquiring infrastructure in light of changing macroeconomic realities.
Kirill Lisitsyn, Chief Executive Officer of Torus, pointed out that the partnership addresses a blind spot that has long burdened the payments industry. "By combining SRM’s deep advisory expertise with the Torus transaction-level analytics platform, we’ve created a solution that addresses one of the industry’s largest hidden profit leakage challenges," Lisitsyn stated. He noted that early customer deployments clearly illustrate how significant profitability jumps can be achieved through rigorous fee assurance, disciplined pricing governance, and automated analytics.
Echoing these sentiments, John Berns, Managing Partner for SRM Europe, stressed that the fundamental economic foundations of the acquiring business have shifted permanently. "The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed," Berns remarked. "Growing scheme fee complexity means that traditional reconciliation processes are no longer sufficient. Financial institutions need transaction-level visibility to understand where revenue is being lost, ensure fees are accurately recovered, and make better commercial decisions. Our collaboration with Torus enables these improvements."
Corporate Backgrounds and Innovation Milestones
Both Torus and SRM bring impressive credentials and a history of industry innovation to this strategic partnership.
Headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, Torus was founded in 2021 with a singular mission: to help banks and fintechs maximize their financial returns on card transactions. The company’s specialized SaaS intelligence platform enables financial institutions to boost card transaction profitability by up to 50% through sophisticated scheme fee analysis, transaction flow reconciliation, unit-level cost control, and dynamic pricing optimization. Torus has steadily built a reputation as a rising star in European fintech, most recently showcasing its capabilities on the global stage at FinovateEurope 2025 in London.
SRM, on the other hand, is an established international advisory and execution firm that assists financial institutions in navigating complex operational transformations. Making its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023, SRM has built a strong track record of helping clients modernize payments infrastructure, optimize core processing systems, develop digital asset strategies, and drive enterprise-wide efficiency. By guiding banks and credit unions through strategic modernization, SRM consistently helps clients lower operating costs, uncover new revenue streams, and enhance overall productivity.
Implications for the Broader Payments Ecosystem
The launch of the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution signals a broader maturation phase for the merchant acquiring industry. For years, hyper-competition and a relentless focus on top-line volume growth forced many acquirers to overlook backend operational inefficiencies and margin erosion. As global economic headwinds persist, interest rates fluctuate, and compliance burdens increase, the strategic imperative has decisively shifted from volume-chasing to margin defense and operational resilience.
By deploying advanced transaction-level intelligence, acquirers can transform their acquiring portfolios from low-margin, high-risk operational headaches into highly optimized, predictable revenue generators. As more financial institutions adopt these automated reconciliation and fee assurance tools, transparency across the card payment value chain will inevitably improve, establishing a new operational benchmark for the global payments industry.
