Merchant Acquiring & Payments Economics
Win the merchant relationship where the margin actually lives.
The executive challenge
The problem this program solves
Growth in merchant acquiring keeps arriving through channels the institution does not fully control — and supervision is asking questions your reporting cannot yet answer. Margin erosion is quiet and compounding, and it is revealed only when it is expensive to reverse. The programme teaches the operator's craft in merchant acquiring: reading capital, liquidity and unit economics so the next decision is yours, not your vendor's.
Context
Why this matters now
Capability
What you will be able to do
- Diagnose where your institution creates — and destroys — value in merchant acquiring across the balance sheet.
- Stress-test merchant acquiring strategy against rate, FX and credit scenarios before the board or the supervisor does.
- Anticipate the regulatory trajectory of merchant acquiring before it is written into rulebooks.
- Structure merchant acquiring products, pricing and partnerships that survive regulatory and competitive stress.
The IPAT Course Standard
The five-day journey
Each day is a deliberate progression in managerial capability — from strategic context, to analytical frameworks, to applied practice, to executive judgement under pressure, to a capstone that produces something your organisation keeps.
IPAT Signature Case™
The Margin That Walked
The most profitable product at a regional microfinance group has quietly migrated to instant-payment rails the institution does not own; deposits follow the customer, not the branch. The board wants a response before the next pricing cycle — and the merchant acquiring data is contested in every committee.
Your decision: Build competing rails, partner with the platform, or reprice the legacy book to defend margin — each path changes the institution you become.
IPAT Data Lab™
The merchant acquiring unit economics at a regional microfinance group work in the business case and fail in the ledger.
Dataset: Synthetic product-level revenue, cost and capital data for a regional microfinance group.
Your task: Rebuild the unit economics, stress them against rate and funding shocks, and recommend what to scale or exit.
A stress-tested merchant acquiring economics model and a board-grade summary page.
Data → Analysis → Decision, not Data → Code → Certificate
Day 5 · The Capstone
What will you change when you return to work?
Produce a digital finance transformation strategy for your institution: where to play, what to own, which partnerships, and the regulatory posture required.
Methodology
Frameworks you will master
- • IPAT Decision Intelligence Framework™
- • IPAT Transformation Architecture™
- • Value-chain decomposition
- • Risk-adjusted performance measurement (RAROC)
- • Basel-aligned capital and liquidity concepts
Cohorts
Upcoming cohorts
New dates are being scheduled
Register with your preferred start date and our admissions team will match you to the next available cohort — or contact us to arrange an in-house delivery for your organisation.
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