About
We don't sell payment solutions. We make sure you buy the right ones, at the right price.
S.Y. Milestone Consulting Ltd has spent six years on one side of the table: the merchant's. Retailers, SaaS, marketplaces, crypto, gaming: any business where card volume is material. We hold no acquiring license, process nothing, and have no house PSP. What we have is volume, relationships, and a record of what actually happens after the contract is signed.
~$4B / year
Annual processing volume across the merchant structures we have designed or advise on.
~30 banks & PSPs
Active acquiring and PSP relationships, including most of the top ten by volume, across the EU, UK and US.
97% of ~200
In roughly 200 pricing reviews, the offer we brought was cheaper than the merchant's existing one 97% of the time.
These are our own figures, rounded. They describe what has happened, not what we promise. Your outcome depends on your vertical, corridors, risk profile and how a change performs on live volume.
By the provider you choose. Never by one provider.
Milestone is paid a commission by the PSP or acquirer a merchant ends up using. We say this on the first call because it is the obvious question: if the provider pays you, whose side are you on?
Three answers. We earn from whichever of ~30 providers wins, so we have no reason to push one. The volume we bring those providers is aggregated across many merchants, which is why the pricing we obtain is usually below what a single merchant can get alone. And we are only paid while the merchant keeps processing, so a bad fit costs us too.
There is no fee to the merchant for a review.
Operators, not salespeople.
Milestone is founder-led. The founder has been in payments since 2012, running payments and risk functions inside operating companies before moving to the advisory side, and in complex, multi-country acquiring specifically since 2019. Milestone exists to do the one thing a PSP cannot do for a merchant: compare it to the others.
Every review is handled by the founder directly. There is no junior desk.
- Pricing: all-in cost on your actual card mix, not the headline rate
- Approvals: where declines happen by country, card type and issuer, and which are recoverable
- Redundancy: a second path that already carries live volume before you need it
- Terms: reserves, holds, change rights and exit clauses in the agreement
- iGaming under any licensing regime: MGA, UKGC, Curaçao, Anjouan, Kahnawake and other offshore licenses
- Sweepstakes / social casino, including domestic US processing
- Crypto exchanges and on-ramps (MCC 6051) entering new jurisdictions
- Cross-border retail with multi-country acquiring
- Entity structuring for operators without a local entity (MOR and local acquiring)
- Redundancy design: second acquirer, failover, reserve negotiation
What the work looks like.
Retail · ~$700M / yr
26 countries, one acquirer.
A sportswear retailer selling in 26 countries across three continents was running several regional providers because no single one covered the footprint. We consolidated the full footprint under one leading acquirer with local presence in every market, and the all-in cost came down ~20%.
Crypto · ~$500M / yr
New country, same stack.
A multi-licensed crypto platform expanding country by country needed to know which local methods and acquirers would actually work in each new market. We mapped the local options per jurisdiction and brought them under the platform's existing system instead of a new integration per country.
Sweepstakes · ~$500M / yr
Local acquiring without a local entity.
A sweepstakes operator with a complex group structure could not get domestic US processing: the acquirers it approached would not board the structure. We found a provider that could, and it got a domestic solution without restructuring the group.
A travel company we walked away from.
A travel merchant with a clean front end. The further we looked, the more it appeared that part of the activity ran through sanctioned jurisdictions. We declined the engagement. We do not work with sanctioned or prohibited activity, and we do not help anyone structure around that.
The reason is not virtue. Every provider we place a merchant with is a relationship we need next year. One bad file costs more than any commission.
Tell us what your stack costs you.
Short discovery call. Pricing, approvals, redundancy, terms. No fee for the review.