We spent 10 years acting as our customers’ Chief Payments Officer. Now we’ve built one.

Swipesum CPO is a payments command center that combines Audit, Merchant Account, Gateway and Connect with a dedicated payments team. Launched on November 10, 2026, it helps businesses analyze costs, choose providers, implement improvements and manage payment operations.

Swipesum started in St. Louis in 2016. Our mission was to provide the expertise and cost savings that expert payments teams deliver to companies without an in-house payments team. Since then, we’ve worked with businesses ranging from software platforms and ecommerce companies to franchise systems and multi-location brands. Our first call usually goes the same way: a business has begun to identify the costs of a poorly structured payments function. Someone in finance has a merchant statement open with line items that appear unexplainable, a franchise group is paying different rates at different locations, or their processor fees have changed again.

The root of these challenges is structural. Payments systems and their associated costs are complex and ever-changing. Large companies have payments teams to track those costs and optimize them: someone who checks interchange every month, manages the processor relationships, and stays on top of network fee changes. Most of the businesses we work with don't have that person, because that headcount is less attainable for mid-market companies, multi-location brands, franchise systems and B2B sellers. Nobody owns the full picture, so there’s no proactive strategy and no real-time tactical adjustment as rates drift up, transactions downgrade into more expensive interchange categories, stored cards expire, and recurring payments fail.

As an advisory firm, Swipesum has 10 years of experience listening to these problems and solving them. We read the statements, found where the money was going, negotiated with processors, implemented new tech when it made sense and stayed on to fix what broke later. In practice, we were acting as their Chief Payments Officer. Along the way we wrote software to handle the repetitive parts faster, analyzed trends among our customers, and built a deep, data-centered understanding of mid-market payments problems and solutions.

This week we built on that foundation to release Swipesum CPO, a unified platform that combines 10 years of business intelligence with proprietary AI, a flexible gateway that leverages Mastercard Merchant Cloud capabilities and a human implementation team. The result: a product that unlocks the value of a payments team through continuous auditing, identifying optimizations, implementing changes, and empowering our customers to take control of their business.

What's in a CPO? Bringing together a full payments stack in one platform.

Fragmented systems and the lack of a single source of ownership are common themes in broken payments systems. Swipesum CPO brings payments into a single platform, where problems are identified and fixed. To do so, the CPO product suite includes:

• Swipesum Audit reads merchant statements and flags interchange errors, pricing problems, downgrades and residuals worth auditing. If you knew our statement analysis tool as Staitment, this is the same technology with a new name. Companies that want to build it into their own systems can use it through an API.
• Swipesum Merchant Account is our processing and acquiring service. We set up each account around the business's economics, integrations and risk profile, and we adjust it when those change.
• Swipesum Gateway leverages Mastercard Merchant Cloud capabilities and is available to merchants in the U.S. and Canada. It supports network tokenization, card vaulting, recurring billing and Level 2 and Level 3 data, and it updates stored cards automatically when they expire or get replaced. Fraud and security tools are built in.
• Swipesum Connect is a managed PayFac program for software companies, including ERPs and vertical SaaS platforms. They get embedded payments infrastructure, and we help with program design, pricing, merchant onboarding and launch.
• Then there's our payments team of strategists, analysts and implementation specialists. They handle the parts of a CPO’s role that tech can’t: negotiations, implementation and ongoing support. Most customers work with them in a shared Slack channel.

Mechanics of success: how CPO works to optimize your payments function

Finding the problem is the easy part

Plenty of tools will tell you your interchange is off or your processor charges too much. We've watched a lot of businesses get that kind of report and then sit on it. Usually they agree with the findings. They just don't have the time, the leverage with providers or the technical help to act on them.

So we set CPO up to carry the work through. Audit runs alongside our merchant accounts, Gateway, Connect and the people who manage them. When Audit finds something, the same team can renegotiate the rate, restructure the account, fix the interchange setup, move stored cards to network tokens or rework an embedded payments program. Then we keep checking that the fix holds.

AI backed by a decade of business intelligence

AI does the reading. Statements arrive from different processors in different formats. Audit uses AI to put them into a consistent structure, then checks them against rules and benchmarks we've built over 10 years of doing this work by hand.

Deciding what to do about the findings is still a job for people. Changing a processor or a gateway involves contracts, migrations and trade-offs that depend on how a particular business operates. We'd rather an experienced person make that call with the customer.

Provider-agnostic processing is key

We aren't tied to one processor, so our starting question is which setup fits the business. Two Swipesum customers can run on two different processors. If a customer's volume or needs change later, we'll recommend changing the setup too.

Network tokenization is one of the capabilities we evaluate as part of that setup, alongside gateway support, processor compatibility and credential lifecycle management. Our team works through the integration and migration requirements with the customer before recommending a change.

A modern payments platform, backed by a real team

The track record behind CPO comes from the work we’ve done with businesses over the past decade. Our internal analysis shows that 88.7% of businesses we analyze have a meaningful opportunity to lower payment processing costs. Among optimized customers, the average reduction in processing markup is 57%. Processing markup is one component of total processing cost. CPO brings the technology and payments expertise behind that work into one platform.

“Our customers deserve options — regardless of the size of their business or payments team,” said Dylan O’Donnell, president of Terrier Technologies. “Swipesum gives users of our flagship ERP Clypboard a modern payments platform backed by a team that puts customer service first.”

The future: building on CPO’s success

CPO launches in our tenth year. Much of it is the same work we've always done. The difference is that CPO brings new efficiency, transparency, and control to our customers.

For 10 years, we’ve acted as our customers’ Chief Payments Officer: analyzing their costs, negotiating with providers and fixing what wasn’t working. Now we’ve built that work into Swipesum CPO.

If you’re running payments without a payments team, talk to our payments team about your current setup and what you want to improve. You can also start with a statement audit.

Read the official Swipesum CPO launch announcement on Business Wire.