What Optimus found in past PoVs: The real cost of payment inefficiencies

Merchants don’t lose margin in one place—they lose it in tiny, compounding gaps across fees, funding, disputes, and manual work. Over dozens of Proof-of-Value (PoV) engagements, Optimus has seen a consistent pattern: when you connect all payment data, reconcile continuously, and audit fees daily, real money comes back—fast.

This post distills what we’ve learned from recent PoVs and what it actually costs to leave payment operations “good enough.” For a deeper dive (merchant quotes, benchmarks, and the exact 4-week rollout), grab the whitepaper: Unlocking Merchant Payments Efficiency in 2025: Voices from MAG and Solutions from Optimus.

What PoVs Reveal (the “oh, wow” moments)

1) Hidden fees and opaque pricing add up. Merchants report 3–5% revenue impact from payment oversights—pricing drift, misapplied assessments, and contract mismatches that no one catches until quarter-end (if ever).

2) Chargebacks are rising—and many are illegitimate. Across markets, merchants see a growing share of disputes they judge as non-genuine, while recovery rates lag. External research echoes the trend: global chargebacks are expected to reach ~324M by 2028, up ~24% from 2025. That’s a rising tax on margin if your evidence isn’t stitched to each order.

3) Manual reconciliation is still the norm. 78% of merchants say substantial parts of their monthly reconciliation remain manual—copy/paste across PSP portals, banks, ERPs, and app stores. The result: slow close, delayed cash clarity, and write-offs that harden.

4) Multi-acquirer helps approvals—but can spike fee errors. One PoV cohort saw +3.5% approval uplift after adding local acquirers—great for topline—but also uncovered new fee anomalies that were previously invisible. Reconciliation and fee normalization become non-negotiable in multi-rail stacks.

5) The human cost is real. A 500+-location retailer logged two weeks of monthly accounting work just to chase POS vs bank variances; analysis showed ~50% of it was automatable. Another manual audit surfaced ~$2M in duplicate scheme fee debits—money no one would’ve recovered without a granular fee audit.

The bill for “payment inefficiency”

Revenue leakage. Unmatched captures, asynchronous funding, partial settlements, app-store & wallet timing, and untracked refunds all convert to write-offs. When PoVs wire up every source and reconcile to the penny, variance shrinks and recoveries jump. See Optimus’ Payment Reconciliation product overview.

Disputes & fraud externalities. Every missing descriptor, delivery/usage log, or 3DS result knocks down win-rates. Meanwhile, the true cost of fraud compounds: in North America, each $1 of fraud costs ~$3.00 after fees, operations, and inventory. Linking evidence at the transaction level changes both outcomes and cycle time.

Time to close (and cash visibility). Manual reconciliation is a core close bottleneck industry-wide; APQC’s benchmarks show many teams still burn multiple days on monthly close—time stolen from forecasting and fee control. Moving from month-end to daily/continuous reconciliation is the unlock.

Fee overbilling. Daily fee normalization against contract logic exposes basis-point drift you can actually reclaim—or use to renegotiate with data. Our PoVs routinely flag mis-tiering or duplicate assessments that would otherwise persist.

The 4-Week PoV: How merchants prove value quickly

Optimus runs a focused, low-lift PoV designed to return dollars in-period. The steps below mirror the framework detailed in the whitepaper.

Week 1 — Data onboarding & integration Connect PSPs, gateways, acquirers, networks, banks, wallets, and your ERP/billing data—no big-bang replatforming, just connectors and mapping.

Week 2 — AI activation & fee auditing Normalize fees to contract schedules; start anomaly detection. Merchants often see immediate flags in disputes, fees, or funding.

Week 3 — Reconciliation automation Deterministic matching on hard keys (PSP ref, ARN/RRN, batch) plus probabilistic/ML for timing and amount variances; exception queues prioritized by dollar impact.

Week 4 — Insights, recoveries & audit-ready reporting Publish variance dashboards, recovered sums, win-rate shifts, and fee deltas—ready for Finance Ops and the CFO’s page one.

What to measure weekly (so value doesn’t slip)

• Variance recovered (bps of GMV) from mismatches to recognized revenue.
• Dispute win-rate uplift once evidence auto-attaches to transactions. Rising global volumes make this critical (324M projected by 2028). Mastercard
• Days to close trending toward a “continuous close.” APQC
• Fee variance caught vs contract (bps saved or reimbursed).
• Cash-forecast accuracy after switching to daily reconciliation.
  

Where to start (today)

1. See the gaps. If your team still pulls files from multiple portals, you’re likely leaking basis points.

2. Automate the matching. Let humans handle exceptions; let software do the rest.

3. Audit fees daily. Quiet basis points are found money.

4. Make evidence native. Attach delivery/usage logs, 3DS, device IDs—turn disputes from archaeology into clicks.

Book your demo to understand Optimus at length.