How one customer cut card fees by more than £60,000 a year

The challenge

A business came to us in 2026 looking for a way to take card payments over the phone without card numbers being read aloud to staff. That was the job we were hired for. We've kept them anonymous here — the figures are theirs and they're real, but the name isn't ours to publish.

While we were scoping the work, we asked a question we ask every new customer: when did you last check what you're paying to accept cards? The answer was the one we usually get. They'd agreed their rates years earlier, the paperwork had been filed, and nobody had looked at it since. Their provider had no reason to ring up and offer them less.

So they sent us their last three months of card statements.

The solution

We read every line of those three months. Card fees are hard to compare because the cost arrives in pieces — a percentage of each sale, a fixed fee per transaction, monthly charges with names nobody explains, and authorisation fees that get lost in the total. Pulling it apart line by line is the only way to see the real rate a business is paying.

We've spent more than a decade working alongside the companies that process card payments, so we know what they charge and what they'll agree to when someone who knows the market asks. We benchmarked their rates against what a business of that size and card mix should expect to pay, then went and got them that rate. They moved to a different provider and we handled the switch with them.

At the same time we put in the Paytia card capture suite, so the phone payments job they originally came to us for was solved alongside the saving.

The results

They now pay more than £60,000 a year less to accept cards than they did before they called us. Same cards, same customers, the same money arriving in the bank — a smaller bill at the end of the month.

Nothing changed for the people paying them. Their own customers never saw the switch, and there was no gap in taking payments while it happened.

On top of that, card numbers are now off their phone channel entirely. Callers key their own card details on their own keypad while staff stay on the line, so the digits are never heard and never enter their environment.

We should say how we're paid for this, because we'd rather tell you now than have you wonder later. The provider that gains the business pays us a commission for the introduction. The customer pays us nothing for the rate check, and we earn nothing by telling a business to stay where it is — which is sometimes the right answer, and when it is, we say so.

Related reading

If you want the detail behind the numbers, we've broken down every charge that shows up on a merchant statement, and explained how the money actually moves from a card to your bank. You can send us your own three months of statements whenever you're ready, and the payment providers we work with are listed in full.

Key benefits

• More than £60,000 a year off the cost of accepting cards
• Three months of statements read line by line, including the charges that are easy to miss
• The saving was worked out after any cost of leaving the old provider
• No gap in taking payments during the switch, and nothing for their customers to notice
• Card numbers no longer reach staff or their card environment on phone payments
• The rate check cost them nothing — the gaining provider pays us a commission