Payment Networks Benchmarking
You get an independent, expert-led view of how your network products compare to the industry.
A payment network product is more than just an API. Above the waterline sit the things everyone discusses — the business proposition, the customer journey, the risk concerns. Below it is the heavy lifting: operating regulations, technical specifications, enablement and certification programs, partner implementations, and the technology build itself.
The risk is not that any single layer fails. The risk is that the layers compound. A regulation gap surfaces in certification. A technical specification gap surfaces in partner implementation. By the time the gap is visible above the waterline — in lost market share or stalled adoption — it is expensive to close.
An independent, expert-led benchmark of your payment network products against the industry standard. We bring the framework, the data, and twenty-plus years of payments expertise. You direct the scope.
Each product in scope is profiled on a "baseball card" – a one-page scorecard that captures the eight dimensions that decide whether a feature is a strength, a gap, or a risk. Across an engagement, we produce a card per product, a feature-by-feature comparison matrix, and a portfolio-level read of where you stand.
Each baseball card captures, per product:
- Product functionWhat the product does and where it sits in the network.
- Stakeholders' benefitsValue created for cardholders, issuers, acquirers, merchants and the network itself.
- Competitors' statusWhere the comparison set stands on this product today.
- Competitors' strengthsWhat specifically makes a competing product strong, in policy and in technology.
- How to close the gapConcrete actions to reach parity or leapfrog.
- Strategic valueWhy this product matters for the network's positioning.
- Complexity levelT-shirt sizing — an indicative effort estimate to act on the recommendation.
- Cost of doing nothingThe consequence of leaving the gap open.
From these cards, the engagement produces:
- A clear view of your position against the industry.
- Summarised and categorised signals from the market.
- Insights and indicators of potential threats and risks, surfaced early.
- The detail and analytics behind each change, cleared from the noise.
Our expertise covers the full surface of a modern payment network across hundreds of underlying features. You decide whether to go wide across all domains, or narrow and deep into the one that matters most for the decision in front of you.
The five capability domains:
Core network capabilities
Authorisation, clearing & settlement, disputes, account management, on-behalf-of services, payment gateway, processing services, level 2 / level 3 data.
Security capabilities
Onboarding, AML / KYC, fraud alerts and detection, liability protection, authentication services (biometrics, device intelligence, OTPs, passkeys, FIDO).
Enhanced capabilities
Tokenisation & e-commerce (3-D Secure, agentic commerce, digital wallets, click-to-pay, virtual card numbers), money movement (account-to-account, cross-border, open banking, transactional APIs).
Network services
Commercial cards, fleet, government, BNPL, instalments, stablecoins, private label, credit, debit, prepaid, payment acceptance, merchant and partner enablement.
Cardholder services
Travel benefits, rewards & loyalty, cardholder protection, emergency replacement, insurances.
Every benchmark follows the same four-phase approach. The depth of each phase scales with the engagement, but the structure does not change — it is what gives our deliverables their consistency, regardless of the scope you choose.
Desk research
We analyse your products, assess the competitive landscape, identify the key patterns the engagement will need to test, and collect initial observations.
Expert interviews
We conduct blind, anonymous interviews with subject-matter experts from our network to capture the market perspective and form preliminary hypotheses.
Detailed OSINT & analysis
We conduct the feature-by-feature comparison, technical reverse engineering, and use-case impact assessment needed to validate or refute each hypothesis.
Summary
We document conclusions, finalise the comparison matrix, and create and deliver the report alongside a structured readout to your team.
Every engagement produces a benchmark you can present to your board on the morning it lands. Detailed enough for product to act on. Structured enough for the roadmap conversation. Sourced enough to defend the recommendation.
The deliverable comes in three connected parts:
Ecosystem analysis & overall benchmark
The landscape, mapped. Who is doing what, where the market is moving, and how your portfolio sits inside that picture — at the product, capability, and feature level.
Observations & gaps
Feature-by-feature scoring with clear indicators. Where you lead, where you trail, where you are on par, and the policy and technology reasoning behind each gap.
Recommendations
Concrete actions, complexity sizing, stakeholder benefits, and the cost of doing nothing — prioritised so the next roadmap conversation has a defensible starting point.
Upon delivery of the report, we schedule a readout session where we present the report to the relevant teams in your organisation and conduct the set of Q&A sessions to explain the findings.
Standard delivery
Comparison matrix and the readout. The classic format. A complete feature-by-feature comparison matrix in Excel, an executive report in PDF with findings and recommendations, and a structured presentation read out to your team. Yours to take, share, and store.
Continuous delivery
An interactive, queryable benchmark delivered through our secure Explicit Intelligence environment. A living deliverable rather than a static one. Your team can continue interacting with the analytics through a chat agent, drill into the findings, and revisit the analysis as the market moves. Bank-grade secure and ISAE 3402 audited.
The substance of the benchmark is the same in both formats. The difference is how you and your team continue to use it after the readout.