SRM and Torus Partner to Launch Acquirer Profitability Solution Aimed at Recovering Billions in Hidden Revenue Leakage

The global payments landscape is undergoing a structural transformation characterized by shrinking margins, rising operational overhead, and increasingly complex card scheme fee architectures. To combat these mounting industry headwinds, payments profitability intelligence platform Torus and international advisory powerhouse SRM have joined forces to launch the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution. This strategic alliance is designed to equip card acquirers with the advanced tools necessary to plug massive holes in their revenue streams, offering transaction-level scheme fee assurance, automated reconciliation, and granular merchant profitability analytics.

By marrying Torus’s sophisticated software-as-a-service (SaaS) intelligence engine with SRM’s deep strategic advisory capabilities, the joint offering targets one of the most persistent and opaque challenges in modern financial services: hidden profit leakage. Industry analysts and executives alike have long pointed out that manual intervention and legacy reconciliation systems are no longer viable in an ecosystem where card scheme rules and fee schedules shift constantly. This new partnership aims to change that paradigm by giving financial institutions unprecedented visibility down to the individual transaction level, thereby safeguarding billions of dollars in potential revenue and operational savings.

The Genesis of the Partnership and Industry Context

To understand the urgency behind the launch of the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution, one must examine the broader evolutionary trajectory of both participating companies and the market pressures they seek to alleviate. Torus, headquartered in Vilnius, Lithuania, was founded in 2021 with a clear mission: to help banks and fintech enterprises optimize their card transaction profitability through data-driven precision. Over the past several years, Torus has steadily built a reputation as a pioneer in payments intelligence, allowing institutions to unlock hidden value by analyzing complex fee structures, controlling unit-level economics, and streamlining pricing governance. The company’s momentum was notably on display when it showcased its cutting-edge platform at FinovateEurope 2025 in London, capturing the attention of industry leaders seeking modern alternatives to legacy reporting tools.

On the other side of the partnership, SRM brings decades of execution and advisory expertise to the table. Making its formal Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023, SRM has established itself as an indispensable partner for financial institutions navigating digital transformation, core processing upgrades, payments modernization, and operational efficiency initiatives. SRM’s multidisciplinary approach focuses on helping clients unearth new revenue streams while aggressively trimming unproductive expenses.

The convergence of these two entities is timely. The acquiring sector has faced relentless compression of its net margins. As interchange fees become heavily regulated in various jurisdictions and card schemes continuously introduce new assessments, cross-border fees, and compliance charges, acquirers find themselves drowning in data they cannot adequately process. Traditional reporting methods—often reliant on monthly aggregated statements, spreadsheets, and manual sampling—fail to capture discrepancies between what schemes bill acquirers and what acquirers successfully bill merchants. Recognizing this systemic flaw, Torus and SRM engineered their joint solution to serve as a comprehensive operational shield and financial magnifying glass.

Core Capabilities of the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution

The SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution is structured around three foundational pillars: scheme fee assurance, automated daily reconciliation, and multi-dimensional profitability analytics. Together, these modules create an end-to-end operational framework that transforms how financial institutions manage their acquiring portfolios.

First, the platform delivers automated, merchant-level calculation and recovery of interchange and scheme fees. In a typical acquiring operation, thousands of distinct fee components can apply to a single transaction depending on the merchant category code, card type, geographic region, and processing channel. When acquirers rely on aggregated data, under-recoveries often go completely unnoticed, while over-recoveries can lead to merchant friction and churn. The SRM/Torus solution automates this complex web of calculations, ensuring billing accuracy and minimizing revenue leakage.

Second, the solution provides daily transaction-level reconciliation between card schemes and merchant settlement files. By moving away from lagging monthly reconciliations to a continuous, daily audit cycle, acquirers gain absolute transparency into variances, missing funds, and billing errors. This heightened financial control drastically reduces the time and labor required by internal finance and operations teams, shifting their focus from tedious reconciliation tasks to high-value strategic initiatives.

Third, the platform incorporates a robust daily profitability analysis engine. Acquirers can slice and dice data across individual merchants, entire portfolios, and specific market segments. This granular insight empowers commercial teams to make data-backed pricing decisions, optimize portfolio performance, and generate rigorous management reports that satisfy both internal stakeholders and regulatory bodies.

The Macroeconomic Impact: Quantifying the Stakes

The launch of the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution coincides with the release of a comprehensive white paper by SRM titled Transforming Acquirer Profitability. The report offers a sobering assessment of the current state of merchant acquiring, detailing the hidden costs of outdated fee management methodologies and outlining the staggering financial upside awaiting institutions that embrace automated, transaction-level intelligence.

According to economic analyses featured within the report, the financial stakes for the acquiring industry are immense. Over the next five years, global acquirers have the potential to recover up to $1 billion simply by plugging operational cost leaks and streamlining inefficient internal workflows. More impressively, the report estimates that enhanced pricing governance, accurate data oversight, and rigorous fee recovery could unlock an additional $3 billion to $5.5 billion in fee revenue that is currently being left on the table.

Real-world deployments of the underlying technology validate these projections. Early adopters of the Torus platform have already demonstrated substantial financial gains. For instance, a mid-sized European acquirer utilizing the technology successfully improved its annual scheme fee recovery by €4 million. This single optimization represented an extraordinary 10% boost to the institution’s total scheme fee costs, underscoring the rapid return on investment possible when moving to automated transparency.

Perspectives from Leadership

Industry leaders from both organizations have emphasized that this partnership represents a fundamental shift in how acquiring economics must be managed in the twenty-first century.

Kirill Lisitsyn, Chief Executive Officer of Torus, highlighted the critical nature of addressing hidden profit vulnerabilities. "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 added that early client deployments clearly illustrate how significant profitability jumps can be unlocked through superior fee assurance, robust pricing governance, and automated analytics.

Echoing these sentiments, John Berns, Managing Partner for SRM Europe, pointed to the structural evolution of the payments ecosystem. "The economics of acquiring have fundamentally changed," Berns observed. "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."

Broader Implications for Financial Institutions and Fintechs

The introduction of this joint solution carries significant ramifications for the wider financial services ecosystem. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies regarding fee transparency, fair pricing, and merchant disclosures, card acquirers can no longer afford to operate with blind spots in their cost structures. Regulatory bodies across North America, Europe, and other major markets are increasingly demanding clarity on how fees are passed through to end merchants. Tools that offer verifiable, transaction-level audit trails will become compliance necessities rather than optional enhancements.

Furthermore, in an environment where venture capital and private equity investors closely scrutinize the operating margins of payments companies and merchant acquirers, operational efficiency is paramount. Acquirers that implement automated fee recovery and dynamic pricing models will command higher valuations and exhibit greater resilience during economic downturns. By automating what was once a notoriously manual, error-prone back-office function, institutions can reallocate vital human resources toward client acquisition, product innovation, and customer retention.

Conclusion and Future Outlook

The strategic partnership between Torus and SRM marks a critical turning point for the merchant acquiring sector. By bridging the gap between high-level strategic advisory and hyper-granular software analytics, the SRM/Torus Acquirer Profitability Solution provides a timely antidote to the margin compression plaguing the industry. As financial institutions grapple with the exponential growth of scheme fee complexity, solutions that offer absolute visibility, automated reconciliation, and multi-million-dollar recovery potential will rapidly transition from innovative edge cases to mainstream infrastructure standards. With early implementations already yielding transformative financial returns, the initiative signals a new era of data-driven discipline and profitability for acquirers worldwide.