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Enterprise Management 1 / 4Go to Market Model
Selecting the most appropriate go to market model – either direct selling or through distribution partnerships – is one of the most important and difficult decisions for modern payment enterprises. PSE works closely with its clients to build robust routes to market strategies which leverage alliances, reduce the cost of sales, maximise new client acquisition and revenue growth.
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Enterprise Management 2 / 4Strategy
Developing a payments business strategy can be highly complex given the many moving components that need to be assembled to construct a credible plan. PSE brings together a strong understanding of payments market dynamics and the operational challenges of building scalable business cases reflecting unique propositions and products for our clients which will generate revenue growth and increased profits.
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Enterprise Management 3 / 4Target Operating Model
Operating Models provide a highly important framework within which the Executive Management Team lead and control a payments business. We have a wide and detailed understanding of the complexities of managing and delivering an end-to-end service in the payments industry. Using case study-based frameworks, we help our clients benefit from realigning their operating models with their tactical and strategic market objectives to ensure a clear Team focus on market requirements, expansion and growth.
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Enterprise Management 4 / 4Training and Coaching
The payments business is extremely complex and difficult to understand because of its unique commercial models as well as card scheme and interbank dependencies. PSE provides training to some of the world’s largest payment firms drawing on our hands-on experience of delivering business case focused consulting assignments across the payments industry. This enables us to bring our training and coaching sessions to life, ensuring active staff participation and a rapid transfer of knowledge.
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Revenue and Product Enhancement 1 / 6Customer and Client Requirements
Defining requirements for new products and ventures needs careful consideration if they are to be successful. One of PSE’s great strengths is the depth of understanding and added value we deliver because we work for a wide range of customers – from merchants through to schemes. We ensure that our recommendations are built on a detailed appreciation of customer and client requirements for the ‘As Is’ and the ‘To Be’ futures and that the benefits delivered are thoroughly defined and quantified.
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Revenue and Product Enhancement 2 / 6Mystery Shopping and Pricing
Often acquirers, issuers and processors lack feedback on end customer perceptions of the value for money of their services. We regularly undertake mystery shop surveys and primary customer research to monitor payments trends. Surveys range from cost of card acceptance through to exception management handling enabling our clients to assess and adjust the competitiveness of their offers and the quality of services delivered.
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Revenue and Product Enhancement 3 / 6New Market Entry
Entering new markets is a daunting prospect for any organisation. PSE brings 30 years of experience in researching and supporting clients to successfully enter new markets whether these be new regions, new countries, new customer targets or new product lines. Our process ensures that opportunities are identified, quantified, market positioning strategies evaluated, barriers to entry and competitors assessed, local customs and practices and regulations understood, solid business cases constructed, and clear recommendations made to enable Executive Go/No Go decisions.
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Revenue and Product Enhancement 4 / 6Product Extensions
New products are expensive to develop and often have a high risk of failure. As a result, revisiting existing product offerings and enhancing features or distribution models has become an important part of payments product management. PSE’s understanding of market dynamics, innovation trends, regulation and customer requirements helps clients rapidly develop and deliver compelling product extensions and new value-added services.
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Revenue and Product Enhancement 5 / 6Product Innovation
Investment in product innovation is a must to ensure the survival of a competitive payments business. PSE has helped define payments product innovation concepts and ideas for our clients for over 30 years. Our recommendations draw on extensive research and are based on a customer centric approach to new technology, enabling clients to ideate, and rapidly develop and deliver new competitive edge propositions, products, and services.
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Revenue and Product Enhancement 6 / 6Revenue Pool Analysis
Often client product teams struggle to quantify the size of the Target Addressable Market for the new propositions and products they design. PSE brings together an industry leading understanding and modelling of the quantitative drivers of payments market revenue pool sizing and subsequent margin management. We maintain a comprehensive portfolio of card and payments data which can be rapidly applied to support country and sector research and business decision making.
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Cost Optimisation 1 / 4Cost of Ownership Modelling
All new investments should show a benefits stream and a credible five-year return. Our assignment recommendations are built upon the construction of robust financial modelling of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of new Capex and relevant Opex relating to investments in new products and ventures. Use of benchmark KPI enables our clients to quickly ensure appropriate focus on the financial implications of crucial business go/no go investment decisions.
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Cost Optimisation 2 / 4Process Reengineering
At PSE, many our consulting team bring direct experience of process reengineering and business transformation. We utilise a wide range of benchmarks, metrics, and best practice international standards guidance to redesign and enhance complex legacy payments processes, to automate, reduce costs and improve efficiency.
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Cost Optimisation 3 / 4Supplier Selection
Choosing a new supplier and assessing their offers is a complex exercise. PSE offers tested methodology for managing RFIs and RFPs and the subsequent evaluation of suppliers. PSE maintains a strict policy of impartiality during the selection process and as independent consultants, we are ideally placed to identify credible, resilient new suppliers.
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Cost Optimisation 4 / 4Transaction Optimisation
Failure to make a sale because of technical network errors is a cause for concern for Executive Management. Declined authorisations can lose online merchants significant sales and damage card issuers interchange volumes. Because PSE understands in detail the end-to-end transaction process and the reasons why declines occur along the value chain, we offer a practiced methodology and service designed to significantly reduce the level of declines and improve revenues for both merchants and issuers.
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M&A 1 / 6Commercial modelling
Typically, target asset sale IMs present ambitious revenue growth models and forecasts which require independent evaluation and assessment. Drawing on preexisting addressable market models, PSE is able to conduct robust revenue and margin pool analysis, develop realistic profit and resource projections, and propose achievable sales and marketing projections as inputs into the asset valuations and bids.
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M&A 2 / 6Commercial and Risk Due Diligence
Failure to conduct proper due diligence is a high-risk approach to buying new payments assets. PSE adopts a comprehensive buy and sell side commercial and risk due diligence methodology for strategic and private equity clients seeking to invest in payments and fintech businesses. PSE have supported client bids for many of the major EU payments sector transactions that have arisen over the past 20 years and as a result, can draw on the knowledge gained from many case study assignments.
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M&A 3 / 6Compliance Audits
Failure to meet regulatory and card scheme compliance mandates can result in damaging new businesses, suspension of mandates and even the loss of licences and scheme membership. PSE provides structured audits of target assets exposure to, and compliance with relevant national and payment scheme rules and regulations to reassure investors and reduce buyer risk exposure.
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M&A 4 / 6Customer and Supplier Insights
Target company’s customer feedback on service quality and pricing can provide significant insights into client relationships. As part of our due diligence process, we undertake structured interviews with both customers of, and suppliers to, target organisations, providing vital external validation of management perceptions of customer service reducing potential post purchase risks.
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M&A 5 / 6Post Purchase Implementation
Post purchase, investors typically develop a plan for the first 100 days. PSE provides a structured planning methodology to help build post purchase implementation programmes for new payment asset acquisitions which cover new frameworks and processes for governance, operating models, risk management controls, compliance structures, and organisational transformation plans to ensure the fast build of go to market plans.
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M&A 6 / 6Technical and Operational Due Diligence
Technical and Operational due diligence has to be conducted by highly experienced payments consultants. For both strategic and private equity investors we use a detailed due diligence framework to assess the development methodologies and skills and front, back office operational support services used by the target company. We draw on our consultant’s extensive hands-on experience in planning and developing systems, running technical infrastructures and managing operational services to develop practical and realistic assessments.
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Compliance & Risk 1 / 6AML and Safeguarding
Regulators and card schemes have become increasingly concerned to ensure that payments providers adhere to their AML mandates and that they ensure that client funds are ring-fenced and safeguarded. PSE can help ensure regulatory rules are followed, help conduct audits and assessments, recommend improved business processes to ensure compliance, reduce risks and avoid regulatory and card scheme interventions.
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Compliance & Risk 2 / 6Governance
A well-designed governance structure is an essential Operating Model component for the successful management of a payments operation. We help our clients ensure that their governance structures are relevant, risk based and compliant. In addition, we can assist in developing the essential risk conscious culture that regulators and card schemes expect within a well-run and organised modern payments operation.
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Compliance & Risk 3 / 6Licensing
Without regulator approved licences and card scheme membership, new on risk entrants into the payments business are unable to operate. PSE provides support across the full application and approval lifecycle, including planning for, obtaining and retaining regulatory and card scheme licences. This includes capital requirements, business case submission, definition of key management roles, governance structures, internal compliance processes, external audit, operational monitoring and regulatory and scheme reporting.
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Compliance & Risk 4 / 6
Policy Development
Typically, the Board and Senior Leadership Team are responsible for developing commercial frameworks, operating models, and the Executive team’s roles and responsibilities. Policy frameworks should be a source of enabling business flexibility and differentiation rather than overfocusing on business practices. PSE’s policy framework advice and recommendations seek to balance policy mandates with an organisation’s requirement for pragmatic rules that measure risk control and commercial operations against the need to drive revenue and profit growth.
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Compliance & Risk 5 / 6Regulator and Scheme Compliance
Across the EU, domestic market regulators are closely monitoring licensed payments providers to ensure they have in place an effective compliance structure. Both Regulators and Schemes frequently release often complex new and amended compliance mandates. PSE has worked closely with many clients to carefully consider the impact of new rules developing plans for their implementation and subsequent monitoring and control.
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Compliance & Risk 6 / 6Risk Management
Payments acquiring and card issuing can generate the significant exposures to fraud, bankruptcy, chargebacks and bad debt impairments. Effective risk management is the corner stone of every payments business and a vital enabler for long term profitability. PSE has developed tools, models, and metrics to assess existing risk management processes, recommend new methods, policies, and technical infrastructures to enable the proactive management of risk and reduce ongoing recovery costs and write offs.
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Technology and Operational Delivery 1 / 4
Change Project Management
Delivering large complex change programmes in the payments industry is fraught with risk. We provide our clients with highly experienced payments project managers and PMO resources to develop phased development testing and implementation plans within an agile framework which mitigate risks and enables the delivery of large, complex, payments transformation programmes.
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Technology and Operational Delivery 2 / 4Implementation Support
As well as providing technical design and project management skills and resources, PSE can deliver testing, migration and implementation support, working with the user and operational teams with an agile framework to lead teams, develop plans, facilitate workshops and co-ordinate supplier deliverables.
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Technology and Operational Delivery 3 / 4Operational Resilience
Regulators and card schemes are pressing payment service providers to ensure that processing platforms are operationally resilient, dual sourced and that tested disaster recovery and fallback processes are in place. In addition, banks, corporates, and processors must now seek regulatory approval for major developments and change. PSE’s architecture design criteria and operational audits help our clients to ensure resilience capability is embedded in existing and new platform architectures which are operationally robust, have high availability and enable rapid recovery in the event of major failures.
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Technology and Operational Delivery 4 / 4Technical Architecture Design
Many large merchants and enterprises recognise that their payments processing platforms often implemented 10-15 years ago are no longer aligned with their customer’s requirements and are close to legacy. PSE has developed an industry leading flexible payments architecture redesign methodology which embraces concepts such as orchestration, omnichannel, web/instore innovation, simplification, and standardisation. The methodology enables the full participation of client business and technology teams and ensures the development of credible design concepts, build and delivery options.
