SRM and Torus Launch Solution to Recover $1 Billion in Acquirer Profit Leakage

Global financial advisory firm SRM and payments intelligence platform Torus have launched a joint solution to combat revenue leakage in the acquiring sector. By automating transaction-level scheme fee reconciliation, the partnership aims to recover billions in lost revenue for financial institutions currently struggling with the increasing complexity of card network pricing and manual back-office processes.

What was announced

The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution has been introduced to provide financial institutions with transaction-level visibility into their payments operations. The launch is supported by a new white paper from SRM titled “Transforming Acquirer Profitability,” which highlights a critical gap in the market: while interchange fees are generally transparent, scheme fees have become increasingly opaque and complex. This complexity often leads to revenue leakage, where acquirers fail to accurately recover costs from their merchant clients.

The solution targets three primary operational areas. First, Interchange and Scheme Fee Assurance automates the calculation and recovery of fees at the merchant level to improve billing accuracy. Second, Settlement Reconciliation provides daily transaction-level matching between card schemes and merchant settlement files to identify variances and improve financial controls. Finally, Merchant Profitability Analytics offers daily insights across portfolios and segments to inform pricing governance and commercial optimization.

The financial impact of these inefficiencies is substantial. SRM estimates that manual reconciliation processes cost the global industry more than $200 million annually. By shifting to automated systems, the firm suggests the global acquiring industry could reduce costs incurred through manual processes by up to $1 billion over a five-year period. Furthermore, more accurate data oversight could allow acquirers to recover between $3 billion and $5.5 billion in fee revenue that is currently lost due to poor visibility. Early customer deployments have already shown results, with one mid-sized European acquirer improving annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million, representing approximately 10% of their total scheme fee costs.

"The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed. 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."

John Berns, Managing Director SRM Europe at SRM.

The companies involved

SRM is a global financial advisory firm specializing in helping financial institutions and companies improve their operational performance and profitability. The firm provides deep advisory expertise, particularly in the European market where it operates as SRM Europe. Its focus remains on identifying cost-saving opportunities and revenue enhancement through strategic vendor management and process optimization.

Torus is a Lithuanian fintech company that operates a payments profitability intelligence platform. Led by Founder & CEO Kirill Lisitsyn, the company has gained significant traction in the European fintech ecosystem. In late 2024, Torus secured a strategic investment from Goose Valley Ventures, a move that signaled growing investor confidence in the firm’s ability to solve complex data challenges within the payments value chain. Torus focuses on providing granular, transaction-level analytics that allow acquirers and processors to forecast costs and manage margins with higher precision than traditional aggregated reporting tools allow. By combining SRM’s consultancy reach with Torus’s technical platform, the two entities aim to address profit leakage that has historically been considered a "hidden" cost of doing business in payments.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed the growth of Torus within the European payments landscape. In December 2024, we reported that Goose Valley Ventures Invests in Leading Lithuanian FinTech Torus, highlighting the company's emergence as a key player in the Lithuanian fintech sector. We also covered the launch of their previous technical innovations, noting how a New Torus Tool Brings Clarity to Card Transactions Costs Forecasting by providing more transparent data for financial institutions.

The company’s impact on the industry has also been recognized through our awards programs. Torus was featured in our coverage when The Finalists Announced for the 2025 FF Awards were revealed, and they were subsequently celebrated in our report on the winners: FF Awards 2025 - The Results Are in! Congratulations to All the Winners!.

What this means

The acquiring market is currently caught in a pincer movement of rising scheme fees and aggressive margin compression. For years, many acquirers treated scheme fee leakage as an acceptable margin of error, but as operating costs climb and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, that leakage has become a threat to long-term viability. This announcement signals a shift in the industry toward "precision acquiring," where profitability is managed at the transaction level rather than through broad portfolio averages. Competitors still relying on manual, aggregated reporting are likely to find themselves under increasing pressure to justify their pricing models and protect their margins against more data-driven incumbents who can identify every cent of profit leakage.