Africa’s payments volumes are growing — but rising costs and hidden revenue leakage are quietly compressing bank margins
Margin Pressure and Rising Costs
Payments are no longer just about pushing more transactions → rising costs, interchange fees, penalties, and compliance charges erode profitability and force optimisation.
Opaque and Complex Scheme Fees
Scheme fees, interchange and billing are opaque, everchanging and punitive plus regulatory changes add to pricing pressures.
Limited Visibility and Cost Misallocation
Banks lack insight into miscodes, FX spreads, duplicate or disguised fees, non-mandatory services, and cannot accurately allocate costs between issuing and acquiring or across customer or merchant segments.
Manual Processes and High Cost of Ownership
Manual reconciliation, allocation, and reporting – combined with paying invoices without scrutiny – lead to inefficiencies, higher costs, and missed optimisation opportunities.
Experience the power of Optmizer
Continuous margin maximisation — cost recovery + revenue enhancement.
In payments, fees, rules, and market conditions shift quarterly but many incumbents only review/ reconcile after long internal cycles.
Optimizer enables continuous control across the 6 modules detailed below.
2 levers that drive margin maximisation
1. Cost Recovery: stop the leaks
Ensure scheme fees and interchange fees get appropriately passed on. Fix invoices that don’t match and eliminate mistakes that pile up over time.
2. Revenue Enhancement: make more on every deal every day
Price customers correctly, eliminating hidden loss-making relationships.
Ensure Scheme fees and Interchange fees get appropriately passed on.
Fix invoices that don’t match and eliminate mistakes that pile up over time.
Typical Outcomes
Deliver +6-12 bps margin uplift annually
Scheme Fees
Optimizer allows banks to upload international and domestic scheme invoices, automatically breaking down costs across categories such as authorisation, cross-border, marketing, and settlement. It also flags penalties, optional services, duplicate charges, quarter-on-quarter trends, new fees, and areas with cost-saving potential, creating a fast and frictionless entry point.
Pricing Models
By using anonymised transactional clearing files, Optimizer rebuilds scheme invoices per transaction according to scheme rulebooks. It reveals true unit-level profitability across BINs, MCCs, products, and merchants. It reconciles invoices to identify errors and overcharges with up to 98% accuracy, and enables proactive repricing and renegotiation of scheme and merchant terms. Banks gain visibility into issuer vs. acquirer margin contributions, cross-border economics and leakage, enabling P&L rebuilds across the portfolio.
Merchant Profitability
For acquiring banks, Optimizer analyses portfolios by merchant, MCC, and segment to identify unprofitable relationships, support selective renegotiation that can deliver 20–30% profitability uplift, and provide merchant cost indicators that forecast scheme and interchange costs during the onboarding process.
Interchange Fees
Optimizer models the financial impact of upcoming scheme changes, simulates pricing updates, new mandates and scenario adjustments in advance, and provides ongoing alerts for new billing events and structural changes, helping banks stay ahead of cost shifts rather than reacting after the fact.
Billing and Reconciliation
Reconciliation between scheme invoices, clearing files, and merchant billing matching cost, revenue and expected margin. General ledger alignment and dispute-ready evidence. Banks reduce leakage from; incorrect billing, mismatched settlement and unused service charges – easing reconciliation pain.
Contract Digitisation
Optimizer can ingest merchant and scheme-related contracts, enabling automated contract validation, mapping negotiated terms to actual billing, highlighting contract leakage and ensuring merchants are billed correctly. This reduces manual processes and avoids hidden loss.
Key differentiations for enza Optimizer
Low-Friction Onboarding
We take your data exactly as it’s received, whatever its format, and transform it for you. This zero-integration approach eliminates dependence on IT, making onboarding fast and effortless. Automatic monthly ingestion removes ongoing bank-side workload.
Built In Execution: Workflow, Tasks & Alerts
Beyond analytics Optimizer drives actions: actionable recommendations, priority-scored optimisation tasks and automated alerts for anomalies, penalties and new fees. Turn insights into actions – assign owners, track progress, and make savings stick.
Margin Leak Closure
Connect the full value chain to identify and close margin leaks: scheme fees → pricing → billing → settlement/GL → portfolio performance.
Always On Margin Control
Protect margins as conditions change with continuous detection. Perfect for a moving cost base (fees, interchange, rule changes, anomalies).
Modular Design
Start with the Scheme Fee review – a quick-win entry point that proves value early – then scale across the profitability chain with adoption of the different modules: Pricing Models, Merchant Profitability, Interchange Fees, Billing and Reconciliation, and Contract Digitisation.
Consulting Support & Service Delivery
Access to our deep consulting layer, delivered by senior payments experts with 25-30+ years of issuing and acquiring experience across global banks, processors, and schemes. Every Optimizer engagement includes hands-on involvement from specialists who previously ran issuing portfolios, acquiring businesses, scheme negotiation teams, card P&L functions and pricing and profitability teams.
