In 2016 I moved to the UK with a suitcase and a lot to prove. In 2020 I started working in payments at a UK card payments provider.
I thought my job was to sell card machines. It turned out my real job was to make sense of the most confusing piece of paper a business owner gets every month.
Nobody could show me how
When I started, nobody could tell me how to get a merchant statement. Which ISO or acquirer did the merchant use? How do you get into their online portal? What’s the quickest way to get the statement in front of you? There was no playbook, so I wrote my own.
Once I started reading statements, I saw what most merchants never get to see:
- Some acquirers leave important information off the statement.
- Some add charges that are easy to miss.
- Some send two bills, one for the terminal and one for card processing, so the full cost is never in one place.
- Many charge for the same things under different names, so comparing one provider with another is nearly impossible.
Most merchants had no idea what they were paying for
I sat down with hundreds of business owners, and most had never had their statement explained to them. They didn’t know what each charge was, why it was there or how it worked. They just paid it.
So I learned to read every line, understand it and explain it in plain words. That changed everything. Once a merchant understood their own bill, they trusted me. They could see I cared about their business, not just about closing a deal.
“Once merchants understood their own bill, the conversation changed. It stopped being a sales pitch and started being help.”
What that approach led to
Being honest and knowing my stuff paid off:
- Top salesperson, years in a row
- On the national podium for cold calling
- Called up on stage 5 times
- Winner’s cheques, winner’s trophies and multiple awards
- Promoted to Area Sales Manager
Along the way I coached teams across the company on competitor knowledge, sales training and reading merchant statements.
The tools came first
To save time, I started building my own tools to calculate savings and spot hidden costs. My team used them, then other sales teams asked for them too. They made bills easier for merchants to understand and made the right answer easier to find.
This calculator is a new tool I built myself, as an independent product. It holds five years of reading statements, turned into something you can use in minutes.
Why I built this for you
Every merchant deserves to know exactly what they’re paying and why. Every payment consultant deserves a tool that makes that clear, fast and accurate.
If you sell payments, this is the tool I wish I’d had on my first day.