New Features for Decoding Payment Costs

It’s never boring over here at Pagos HQ, we’re constantly working on product launches and feature improvements to help merchants across the globe with their payments-optimization needs. In recent weeks, we’ve released some updates to the cost data dashboards within Pagos Insights, designed to help your business get to the bottom of arguably the biggest optimization conundrum: how to decrease the ever-growing cost of processing payments.

Putting Your Fees in Context: A New View of Effective Rate

When you’re managing payments across multiple processors, payment methods, and currencies, even small fee changes can add up quickly. To give your business the full picture of what you pay to keep customer payments rolling in, we designed the Effective Rate dashboard within Pagos Insights. Here, you can see the percentage of your total sales revenue spent on payment processing costs (i.e. effective rate) for each of your processors, card networks, MIDs, accepted payment methods, and settlement currencies. 

We’ve just added a little something extra to make that view even more actionable. Below the effective rate chart, you can now expand each row in the table to view the underlying sale amount and fee amount used to calculate effective rate: 

We introduced this change because effective rate alone doesn’t tell the whole story. A 2.29% rate might seem acceptable until you realize it’s tied to a big segment of your payments and thousands of dollars in fees. This update gives you the actual amounts, so you have fewer blind spots and can spot where costs are climbing.Quickly validate why a rate looks high, identify processors or MIDs that are driving your total costs, and better prioritize where to focus your optimization efforts. 

This addition is also a great way to bridge gaps between teams: finance teams may care about the dollar amounts, while payment teams often work with rates. Now both can see the same numbers, just from different angles!

A Clearer Picture of Transaction-Level Payment Costs

They say the devil is in the details, but in the world of payments, the details contain something much better: insights. When you analyze your fee data at a high level, you understand the cost of processing payments overall. But if you really want to control those costs, you have to get into the weeds of exactly which fees you’re paying on individual transactions and why. That’s why we’ve added transaction-level fees to the Events dashboard in Pagos Insights.

For supported processors—currently Adyen, Braintree, Stripe, dLocal, and PayPal—you’ll now see the following information in the Events details page for individual transactions:

• Total transaction cost

• A breakdown of the associated fees by type (e.g. processor, network interchange, and authorization)

We pull these details from your processor statements, so this section may not populate right away; it can take a few days or weeks depending on the processor. But once they do, you’ll get a much richer view of not just what happened, but what it cost you.

This level of granularity helps our customers move from broad assumptions to precise understanding. You can start to spot patterns, forecast future costs, zoom in on high-fee segments, and better explain what’s driving costs across payment methods, currencies, and processors. It’s one more step toward making your payments data not just accessible, but actionable!

If you haven’t explored the Events dashboard yet, here’s a quick primer on what it can do.

Intelligent Data. Actionable Insights.

With these updates, Pagos Insights continues to evolve into the kind of invaluable payments-optimization tool we’ve always envisioned—one that doesn’t just show you payments data, but instead delivers real payments intelligence. Whether you're chasing down cost-reduction opportunities or investigating unexpected fees, we’re making it easier to understand what’s driving your costs. Improve your payments performance and preserve your revenue with actionable insights from Pagos. 

Contact us today to see how Pagos Insights can transform how you use your payments data!