It started with a statement and a calculator
NexPay began in Plymouth, and I have worked in payments since 2011. For most of that time the job of winning a merchant looked the same whoever you worked for. A merchant sent over last month’s card statement. Someone experienced opened it, opened a spreadsheet, opened a calculator, and started keying in numbers. Forty minutes later there was a price and a proposal, and by then the merchant had often already had a call from someone else.
That was the front book. The back book was worse. Renewals and mid-contract reviews only happened when someone remembered them, because every one meant the same forty minutes again. Nobody in the industry thought this was strange. It was simply how an ISO, and for that matter an acquirer’s own sales team, had always worked.
Big brands, bigger questions
Working with some of the world’s best-known retail brands, including Pandora and Toni & Guy, changed what “pricing” meant for us. International card mixes. Cross-border fees that moved. Renewals that could not be allowed to slip. And a constant stream of questions from the shop floor to our office: which terminal, which integration, what does this line on the statement mean, what will it cost next year.
The answers lived in a few heads. When one of those people was on holiday, the business slowed down. When a new salesperson joined, it took months before they could answer the questions themselves. Knowledge, it turned out, was the thing we were really short of, and no spreadsheet could hold it.
So we built the thing we wished we could buy
We looked for a system that did the job and could not find one, so we built it inside the ISO. First, a pricing engine: it reads the statement, prices it on our own rate card in minutes, and puts a proposal in front of the merchant the same day, for new business and for the renewals we used to miss. Then a knowledge base our own people could ask in plain English, with every answer drawn from documents we had approved and a note of what it drew on. Then onboarding packs built from the same merchant record, and commission worked out for every partner without a spreadsheet in sight.
It ran our ISO before it had a name. The people who used it first were the people who had been doing the work by hand, which is why every screen exists for a reason someone at NexPay could tell you about.
Then it became its own company
Valtura is now its own platform company, separate from the ISO it grew up in. NexPay is one of its customers, and each customer’s data is kept apart from every other’s. That separation matters, because the people we built it for next were not only ISOs.
Any UK ISO can run on it today. The launch piece, Valtura Platform is open to UK ISOs, sets out what is live: the pricing engine and proposals, Knowledge AI, onboarding and commission on one record.
What it does for an acquirer
An acquirer has the same two books we had, front and back, and a great deal more of each. Valtura prices both on the acquirer’s own rate card, in minutes, for its own sales team and for the partners who sell for it: referral partners, ISOs and software companies, each in a workspace carrying the acquirer’s brand. Knowledge AI answers from the acquirer’s approved content, with the safeguards switched on first, so a partner can find the answer without waiting on the acquirer’s team. Priced deals can flow into Salesforce and on to onboarding, so the acquirer’s own systems stay the record.
We do not guess an acquirer’s numbers. We set up a workspace in their colours, walk through it in thirty minutes, and build the business case on their own figures afterwards. The acquirer pages explain each part, and the walkthrough is a short form away.
The part we are proudest of
It is not a feature. It is that the platform was built by a payments business for its own use, under real pressure from real merchants, and then opened to everyone else doing the same job. If you run an ISO, start a trial and price a statement this afternoon. If you are an acquirer, ask for a walkthrough in your brand. Either way, the forty-minute quote is over.