The Real Cost of Payment Decisions – Fintech Garden Interview

In a recent interview at Fintech Garden, Viktoria Soltesz spoke with Igor Tomych about the mistakes merchants make when setting up their payment and banking structure, and why these decisions often cost far more than expected.

Cheap Is Rarely Cheap

Many merchants choose providers based on low fees but the cheap is always more expensive on the long term.

Payment and banking today impact customer experience, risk management, technology, product development, data security, compliance, finance, sales and growth and more - so picking a provider only based on fees creates dangeous tradeoffs in other operational areas.

Lower-cost providers often lead to lower approval rates, technical issues, and weak support which directly affects revenue and customer experience. A failed transaction is a lost sale, not just a technical error.

“Free” Advice Is Never Free

The FinTech industry unfortunately broken - the merchants still heavily rely on introducers, “payment experts,” gateways and orchestrators to bring bank accounts and payment solutions to them. However, these introducers all work for commission - they all sell rather than strategize and truly understand what is the best option for the business.

This is not only unethical but also very dangerous.

Introducers are masking as experts while selling; they recommend shaky solutions just to get more commission, damaging the reputation of solid providers and taking no responsibility when something goes wrong.

Introducers are very expensive too - the market rate is around 0,5-2% of the merchant's voluem, but sometimes half of the provider's profit is paid directly to introducers -while the merchant bears the bill.

Another issue is that many providers are layered behind each other.

A gateway may resell another gateway's services, which sells another one's. This creates hidden dependency and risk, and if one part fails, the entire setup can stop. Understanding the inception of payments is a complex topic but can save a lot of cost and headache in the long term.

Orchestration Is Not the Solution

Payment orchestration is widely discussed, but it is often misunderstood. It can be a useful tool for routing transactions, but it does not replace a payment and banking strategy. Businesses still need to understand how money flows, who controls the funds, and how settlements work across their structure as if the setup is wrong, orchestration only makes the problem run faster.

To see the whole interview visit YouTube: https://youtu.be/lnpY6KGWUvw