Redefining Payment Economics: From Single-Transaction Spreads to Holistic Portfolio Profitability

At the FF News Virtual Arena, industry executives gathered to discuss how modern financial institutions utilize data intelligence to optimize transactional profitability in 2026.

The panel included:

• Ian Horne, Host at FF News

• Breno Alves De Oliveira, Chief Product Officer at PAYABL

• Kirill Lisitsyn, Co-Founder and CEO at Torus

• Mariia Komissarova, Data and AI Retail Business Lead at Raiffeisen Bank International

The panel highlighted a major market shift: evaluating transaction success has moved away from the simplistic fee spreads of the previous decade and transitioned into a multi-layered calculation of unit-level margins, product operations, and long-term customer asset creation.

The Shift to Unit-Level and Granular Margins

In 2026, understanding payment profitability requires drilling down into highly specific, unit-level margins rather than reviewing broad portfolio averages. According to Kirill Lisitsyn of Torus, a specialized SaaS intelligence firm focused on analyzing scheme fees charged by networks like MasterCard and Visa, profitability optimization must be viewed through a granular lens:

• The Acquiring Stream: Margin tracking must drill straight to the individual merchant level, and even down to the specific physical terminal in card-present environments.

• The Issuing Stream: Measurement focuses on the underlying product level and, when sufficient data is available, down to individual customer cohorts.

By securing data transparency at this granular foundation, financial institutions can accurately track exact costs over time and confidently calculate true Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Building Future Value Beyond the Transaction

While granular cost tracking is vital, leading banking institutions look beyond the immediate profit of an isolated transaction. Mariia Komissarova explained that Raiffeisen Bank International—which manages retail data and AI frameworks across 10 countries—views transactional data as a core institutional asset.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the margin of a single transaction, the bank utilizes this underlying data to fuel advanced analytical tools, such as intelligent money managers. This infrastructure increases user engagement, positions the bank at the top of the client’s mind, and drives adoption of adjacent banking products. Ultimately, transactional data acts as the building block for future financial assets, driving downstream profitability and expanding the overarching lifetime value of the consumer.

Total Cost of Ownership and Ecosystem Complexity

Breno Alves De Oliveira of PAYABL noted that the metrics defining a profitable payment program have fundamentally changed over the last several years. In the 2010s, payments were evaluated almost entirely on the “spread”—the basic gap between what a merchant was charged and what the provider paid to settle the transaction.

In the modern landscape, merchants and payment players look past the single transaction line item to evaluate the comprehensive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and operational fit. This holistic product evaluation requires balancing multiple interdependent variables:

• Authorization Rates: Maximizing successful transaction completions to prevent lost merchant revenue.

• Settlement Velocity: Optimizing cash flow, such as ensuring transactions clear and settle within 48 hours.

• Hidden Burdens: Factoring in the operational overhead of monthly volume minimums and systemic chargeback risks.

• User Experience: Delivering frictionless processing that retains end-customer satisfaction.

This shift is driven by the migration of volume away from legacy banking conglomerates and into specialized niche providers that handle specific merchant use cases more efficiently.

Solving the Merchant’s Business Case Puzzle

Today’s enterprise merchants are no longer interested in buying siloed financial services. They arrive with a clear, specific business case and expect their financial partners to deliver a unified solution. Merchants reject fragmented reporting where they must pull risk metrics from one silo, product data from another, and financial reports from a third. They demand to know the exact, end-to-end costs required to make their business case a reality.

To provide this comprehensive visibility, payment providers must assemble a reliable puzzle of data. If the underlying information pieces are inaccurate or un-reconciled, the overall business picture falls apart.

By establishing a robust, integrated data layer, banks can move past basic transparency and deliver strategic market insights to their merchants. Because a regional bank possesses an aggregated, market-wide view of consumer spending habits within a given vertical, they can generate valuable competitive benchmarks for their clients. This collaborative approach creates powerful win-win dynamics: merchants gain actionable compliance-safe insights to optimize their operations, while financial institutions deepen client loyalty and secure sustained transaction volumes.

Key Highlights from the Discussion:

• Granular Margin Mandate: Transactional profitability has transitioned from macro portfolio spreads to hyper-specific unit margins calculated at the merchant, terminal, and product levels.

• Data as an Enterprise Asset: Leading banks utilize routine transaction logs to power advanced analytical tools like money managers, driving engagement and building long-term consumer loyalty.

• The TCO Framework: Evaluating payment program profitability requires analyzing authorization rates, 48-hour settlement windows, and chargeback overhead rather than just processing fees.

• Unified Business Reporting: Enterprise merchants expect financial partners to deliver comprehensive, unified cost data encompassing card schemes, integration costs, and risk parameters.

• Ecosystem Data Integrity: Financial institutions must partner with specialized data intelligence platforms to ensure seamless backend reconciliation and puzzle-piece accuracy.

• Delivering Market Insights: Forward-thinking banks leverage their macro data visibility to provide safe, aggregated market benchmarks that help merchants optimize their businesses.

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