ARKITEKT is Arkonyk's payment architecture practice. Organizations bring us in to make the hard calls in complex payment ecosystems — specific, defensible recommendations on provider selection, cost optimization, fraud strategy, and global expansion, carried through deployment.
Six questions, about three minutes: authorization rate, fraud, chargebacks, refunds, disputes, and what you actually pay to process. Benchmarked against your business model — not a generic average — with an instant read on where you're strong and where you're leaking money.
2.9% effective rate · $62 avg ticket
At a $62 average ticket, the interchange floor for this MCC is 2.11%. The reported 2.9% is a gap of about 79 bps — roughly $7,887 a year on $1M of volume.
Directional estimate — the tool marks what's authoritative versus indicative, and never invents an “industry average.”
Most companies set it up once — early, under pressure, with whoever would say yes — and then never look at it again. Meanwhile volume grows, new markets open up, fraud patterns shift, and processors quietly renegotiate nothing in your favor. The stack that got you to $10M ARR is usually not the stack that should get you to $100M, or even $1B.
Most payments decisions are made with incomplete information and a vendor on the other side of the table. ARKITEKT sits on your side — a payment architecture firm led by senior operators who have built, run, and optimized payments at scale. No product to push, no processor to favor — and no hedging. Just decisive judgment applied to the decisions that move cost, risk, and revenue.
Acquirer selection, routing, and orchestration design aligned to your business — not to any single provider.
Pricing reviews, interchange optimization, and contract negotiation that recover margin and hold it.
Fraud strategy, dispute and chargeback reduction, and network-compliance programs that protect standing.
Diagnose and lift approval rates across processors, methods, and regions where good payments are being lost.
Cross-border acquiring strategy and regional payment-method design for entering and scaling new markets.
RFP management, provider selection, and executive advisory for the decisions that are hard to reverse.
Most consultants hedge — a shortlist of vendors, a scorecard, and the decision handed back to you. ARKITEKT works the opposite way. We know best of breed across the stack and we make specific recommendations: sometimes one name, sometimes a few intentional options, every one backed with reasoning from operators who have made these calls before. Then we stay — through deployment and configuration, until it's live and verified working.
Bring in senior payments expertise for a cost review, a processor decision, or an expansion you can't afford to get wrong.
Merchant solutions →Straight answers on portfolio strategy, pricing, and risk from operators who have run acquiring businesses.
Acquirer & ISO solutions →Design sub-merchant, risk, and monetization strategy as you scale a payment-facilitation or platform model.
PayFac solutions →Companies expanding into new countries, about to discover that payments abroad isn’t “the same thing plus currency conversion.” Local payment methods, local acquiring, cross-border fraud rules, FX exposure, and regulatory quirks all need architecture — not an afterthought bolted onto a domestic setup.
Established merchants running on legacy pricing, legacy processors, or legacy risk rules nobody has revisited since the deal was signed. They don’t know what they don’t know — and they’re often bleeding basis points and unnecessary chargeback losses without realizing it.
Led by four payments professionals, each with 15+ years across fraud, chargebacks, acquiring, card-network relationships, and global strategy — learned by doing it inside some of the biggest names in digital payments.
Not consultants reading a framework off a template — a team that has run fraud, chargebacks, acquiring, and global strategy inside the biggest names in payments.
We don’t hand you a slide deck and disappear. Because we help implement what we recommend, we’re motivated to get the diagnosis right the first time — and you get a team that’s been in the room where these decisions get made.
Current technology and data-driven methods — including modern approaches to fraud detection and payment routing — to spot what older audits miss.
20+ years in disputes and payment partnerships — SVP roles at Visa and Verifi, chargeback strategy at ChargebackHelp and Global Payments.
Led global fraud strategy for enterprise merchants like Ticketmaster, Fandango, and iHerb. Experienced in payments and fraud across 185 countries and 57 payment methods. Provides true global and technical knowledge for today's modern global businesses.
Enterprise payments sales leader — CardinalCommerce (a Visa company), Signifyd, Elavon, and pay-by-bank fintech Spire.
16+ years in payments and fintech — employee #20 at Braintree/PayPal, COO at Rvvup, Chief Commercial Officer at Aeropay and Founder of Stapp Consulting advising merchants and payments companies on go-to-market, expansion and optimization. Passionate about helping businesses cut through payments complexity to unlock faster, smarter growth.
Book a consultation. We'll talk through the decision in front of you — and tell you exactly what we'd do.
