Businesses closely monitor their finances, customer acquisition costs, and conversion rates. However, businesses can still lose money after a customer clicks the Pay button.

Dmitry Sinegubov, Chief Commercial Officer at FinteqHub, explains how this happens and what businesses can do about it.

Ishan Pandey: A business records thousands of successful payments. Why doesn't this necessarily mean that all the money has been received?

Dmitry Sinegubov: There is a record in the company's internal system, a record maintained by the payment provider, and the actual settlement. These records do not always match. For example, an online store may mark an order as paid, while the payment provider reports that the transaction was declined. Or a refund may have already been processed, while the internal system still records the funds as received. Transaction amounts may also differ, and certain fees may go unaccounted for.

Among UK businesses that process at least 50 million payment transactions a year, 85% still reconcile fully or mostly manually while 70% run most of their flows through a single provider.

However, not every discrepancy represents a financial loss. Some may result from delays in updating transaction reports. When a company works with multiple payment providers using different reporting formats, manual reconciliation quickly becomes a significant operational challenge. Our Reconciliation Tool automatically compares transaction records from the client's platform with those from payment providers, identifies discrepancies, and lets financial specialists focus only on cases that require investigation.

Ishan Pandey: Shouldn't finance departments simply hire more employees as payment volumes increase?

Dmitry Sinegubov: Transaction volumes grow faster than employees can process and reconcile them manually. Suppose a company connects five new payment providers across different countries. Each provider has its own reporting formats, transaction statuses, settlement schedules, and refund procedures.

Finance specialists must download reports, consolidate spreadsheets, identify duplicate transactions, and investigate discrepancies. Hiring additional employees may temporarily solve the problem, but as transaction volumes grow, so do operational expenses and the risk of human error.

Worldwide non-cash transactions rose from about 1,439 billion in 2023 to an estimated 1,685 billion in 2024 and are forecast to reach 3,540 billion by 2029, a pace of roughly 16% a year that no finance department grows its headcount to match.

Effective automation does not necessarily mean removing people from the process. Instead, it means eliminating the need for employees to manually verify transactions that already match. The system automatically handles standard cases and refers only disputed or exceptional transactions to human specialists.

Ishan Pandey: How can a technical failure turn into a financial loss?

Dmitry Sinegubov: Imagine a customer attempting to pay for an order, but the payment gateway stops responding. To the customer, this looks like a typical payment error. For the business, however, the situation is more complicated: the transaction may have failed, been processed successfully, or the payment confirmation may simply have failed to arrive.

Automatically retrying the transaction without checking its status could result in a duplicate charge. On the other hand, doing nothing may cause the customer to abandon the purchase entirely.

This is why payment infrastructure needs more than just backup processing routes. It also requires accurate transaction status management, properly controlled retries, and mechanisms for handling uncertain transaction outcomes.

FinteqHub's AutoRouting system includes primary and fallback processing routes, along with safeguards for situations where standard routing rules cannot be applied. However, a fallback route is not a universal solution. In some cases, retrying a payment is unsafe until the outcome of the original attempt is known.

Ishan Pandey: Why can choosing the wrong payment provider cost a business more than paying higher processing fees?

Dmitry Sinegubov: One provider may process payments from cards issued in a particular country successfully but perform less effectively with cards issued by another bank or transactions in a different currency. If all payment traffic goes through a single route, the business may see unnecessary declines.

This is why the approval rate should be analyzed across individual payment segments rather than simply as a company-wide average. Suppose a business receives €10 million in payment attempts every month. Increasing the approval rate by one percentage point, assuming a comparable transaction mix, could generate approximately €100,000 in additional approved payment volume.

However, this does not mean €100,000 in additional profit. Businesses must also account for operating costs, processing fees, refunds, and the proportion of approved transactions that ultimately result in completed settlements.

FinteqHub's AutoRouting organizes payment routes based on country, currency, card brand, and other transaction characteristics. The system helps distribute traffic without excluding promising but less-established terminals, while prioritizing more reliable fallback routes.

For recurring card payments, merchants typically see authorisation rates of 85% to 90% on domestic cards but only 72% to 80% on cross-border cards.

Ishan Pandey: What lies behind a provider's "low processing fee," and how can business leaders determine the true cost of payments?

Dmitry Sinegubov: The advertised processing rate is often only one component of the total cost. Additional expenses may include acquiring and card network fees, currency conversion charges, cross-border fees, refund costs, chargebacks, and fees associated with processing unsuccessful transactions.

There are also less obvious expenses. Employees may spend hours reconciling reports and investigating transaction discrepancies. This is why comparing payment providers solely on their advertised fees can be misleading.

I would recommend that business leaders examine five key indicators: the actual cost per successful payment, Approval Rate by country and payment method, the proportion of unexplained reconciliation discrepancies, the time required to resolve them, and financial losses resulting from technical failures. This breakdown shows where businesses effectively pay twice — through processing expenses and lost revenue opportunities. Payment orchestration, automated routing, and reconciliation tools help businesses address these challenges.

Final Thoughts

Speaking with Dmitry, what stood out to me is how little of a company's payment loss shows up where finance teams usually look. A business can track conversion rates and acquisition costs to the decimal yet still miss the gap between an order marked as paid and the money that actually settles, or the approvals it gives up by sending every card through one route. His five indicators are a practical way to put a number on each of those leaks. I suspect the actual cost per successful payment is the one most companies will find hardest to calculate honestly.

The direction of the market makes this more pressing every quarter. Non-cash transactions are heading past 3.5 trillion a year by 2029 and spreading across more providers, currencies and payment methods, which turns reconciliation, routing and retry logic from back-office chores into part of how a business protects its revenue. FinteqHub is already pushing in that direction with its AI Advisor for payment routing, which beta clients linked to a 23% reduction in blocked and declined payments. I expect the companies that treat payment operations as a measurable performance layer to be the ones that keep more of the money their customers have already decided to spend.

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Vested Interest Disclosure: HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR.