Every merchant quote starts the same way. A statement arrives — a PDF, a photo, sometimes three months of them — and somebody has to turn it into a price. How well and how quickly that happens decides more deals than the rate card does.
This is a guide to that moment: where the hour goes when it is done by hand, what an ISO sees on screen when the platform does the reading, and why the difference matters to the acquirers you place merchants with.
Where the hour goes
Ask an agent to time it and the answer is usually forty to sixty minutes, and it is rarely the reading itself that takes the time. It is everything around it.
The statement has to be found, opened and understood in whichever layout the merchant’s current provider uses — and there are as many layouts as there are providers. The figures that matter have to be picked out and typed into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has to be the right version, which usually means the one person who built it. The merchant’s current cost has to be worked out, then compared against each provider you might place them with, then turned into a proposal the merchant can read. Every step is a place to make a small mistake, and every agent does it slightly differently.
The result is a quote that took the best part of an hour, that no two agents would have produced identically, and that went out after the competitor’s. At NexPay, the ISO Valtura came out of, that was the frustration that started all this.
What the platform shows you instead
On the Broker module the agent uploads the statement — PDF, image or scan — and waits. What comes back on screen, typically inside three minutes, is the reading done:
- The merchant’s turnover, split the way pricing needs it — by card type, with transaction counts, for the period the statement covers.
- What the merchant is really paying today. Not the headline rate: the true, all-in cost of taking cards on their current deal, shown as one figure the merchant will recognise from their bank balance.
- The fixed charges on the account — terminal rental, compliance fees, minimum charges — listed separately so the agent can see at a glance what is easy to beat.
- A price from each provider you work with, from your own rate cards, side by side, with the saving against the merchant’s current cost shown for each.
- A proposal, ready to send — branded, hosted in the merchant’s browser, with the saving laid out and a button to accept.
The agent’s job becomes checking rather than typing. The extracted figures sit next to the statement they came from, so anything odd is a glance away; the choice of provider is a click; and the proposal is out in the time it used to take to find the spreadsheet.
The same reading, every time
The speed is what people notice first. The consistency is what changes the business.
When the platform reads the statement, the same statement produces the same figures whoever uploads it, and the same figures produce the same price from the same rate card. New agents quote like your best agent from their first week. Nobody re-keys a number. The proposal a merchant receives on a Friday afternoon is as careful as the one that went out on Monday morning, and every quote is on the record — who quoted what, from which statement, against which provider — rather than living in a personal spreadsheet.
That record is also where the follow-up lives. A hosted proposal reports back when it is opened, chases itself on a schedule you set, and stops chasing the moment the merchant accepts. The deal then hands straight into boarding without anyone retyping the merchant’s details.
Why this matters to the acquirers you board with
An acquirer sees the same three minutes from the other side.
Every day between a merchant’s statement and a boarded account is volume that has not landed on the acquirer’s book yet. When quoting and boarding run on one system, that gap compresses — and, because the whole journey is on the platform, it becomes a number the acquirer can actually see rather than an anecdote. Consistent pricing from a rate card means the merchants arriving on their book were priced the way their agreement expects, not the way one agent felt like pricing that afternoon. And because the record exists, the questions that used to need an email chain can be answered by looking.
That is why the platform is worth showing an acquirer as well as an ISO: it is the system their channel runs on, and it makes that channel visible.
What to do with the hour
The Broker Platform calculator puts your own numbers on this. A team of twenty agents quoting ten merchants a month each, at an hour a quote, spends about two hundred hours a month reading statements; at three minutes it is ten. The difference is the time your team spends selling.
If you would rather see it than read about it: start the 30-day trial and upload one of your own statements. Nothing to install, no card, and the first proposal is usually out within the hour — including the twenty minutes it takes to sign up.