Turning Payments Data into Realistic Cost Savings

You can’t improve what you can’t see or realistically measure—especially when it comes to the cost of payments acceptance. And in 2025, there’s never been more pressure to measure and make improvements that cut unnecessary costs, improve efficiency, and prove the return of investment for your operational decisions. When we started Pagos, we wanted to give businesses the tools and insights necessary to do just that: optimize their payment processing operations, whether in the name of revenue growth, customer experiences, or cost reduction. 

And we’re doing exactly what we set out to do. Here at Pagos, our team of seasoned payments pros have built a revolutionary dashboard for helping businesses of all sizes not only identify where they can save money, but actually estimate the amount of savings available to them. In other words, Pagos customers can see from day one exactly how much money they could keep in their pockets with a few operational changes.

In this post, we’ll explore the Pagos Opportunities dashboard—a default feature of our payments data visualization platform—which estimates the true payments-related cost savings available to your business. Check out this incredible feature and the methodology behind how we identify where your business could be cutting costs through efficient processing.

Exploring Cost-Saving Opportunities

The Opportunities dashboard is designed to surface tangible, directional estimates of the cost savings available to your business. It’s currently broken into three tabs (with more to come)—each demonstrating the savings available should you make specific adjustments to your payment processing. These adjustments are:

1. Passing Enhanced Data - Some cards qualify for lower interchange fees if you pass along additional transaction details like tax amount, invoice number, or product description. This tab shows you how much you could have saved if Level 2 or Level 3 data had been included on eligible transactions.

   
   

2. Implementing Network Tokenization - When you tokenize eligible card transactions, you may benefit from reduced interchange fees (in addition to improved security and higher approval rates). In this tab, you’ll see estimated savings for transactions that were processed with PANs but could have been processed with a network token instead.

   
   

3. Taking advantage of alternative Debit Routing - Routing US debit transactions through lower-cost, alternative networks (made possible in 2023 by the Durbin Clarification) can lead to significant savings. This tab estimates what you could have saved if eligible debit volume had been routed through an alternative network.

With the Opportunities dashboard, you can see what’s possible for your business, both in terms of operational changes and cost savings. If you haven’t considered pursuing these actions before—passing enhanced data, using network tokens, or adjusting your debit routing—now’s the time to start! And if you’re already implementing these cost-saving measures, the Opportunities dashboard becomes a valuable resource for optimization; for example, are you using network tokens to their full potential and reaping the maximum potential benefits? 

Cost Saving with Confidence

Accuracy is everything when it comes to estimating potential cost-saving opportunities in your payments operations. The last thing you want to do is waste time pursuing savings that might not actually exist or be substantially wrong in your estimations. That’s why each estimate in the Opportunities dashboard includes a confidence score—a simple way to show how much visibility we have into the data behind your estimated savings. You can think of this score as a signal for how certain we are that the savings you see are really available to you.

Calculating Confidence

We’re estimating the actual dollars you could save based on a combination of historical cost data, published interchange rates, and how often optimizations like tokenization, debit routing, or enhanced data are typically applied. But here’s the challenge: in some cases, we don’t have perfect visibility. Your specific processor(s) may not report all routing details or be able to provide information on whether you passed Level 2/Level 3 data, so we must also take these per-processor differences into account. To give you the best possible estimate without overpromising, we’ve used all this context to develop a confidence score for each opportunity.

Here’s how it works: when we have strong visibility—like with network tokenization, where we can see both eligible transactions and whether tokenization was used with select processors—we assign a high confidence score (90% today). In areas with less transparency, like debit routing or enhanced data, we rely on historical usage patterns and industry benchmarks to generate directional estimates. These scenarios receive a lower confidence score to reflect that added uncertainty.

What this means for you: a lower confidence score doesn’t mean the savings aren’t real—it just means there’s more variability in how they might apply based on your current setup. It’s a way to guide your decision-making with as much clarity as possible. It’s our way of saying: “Here’s the opportunity—and here’s how certain we are that it’s real.”

Working With You Opportunities

If your Opportunities dashboard shows high-dollar savings potential with a high confidence score, it's time to act. If you're seeing a lower confidence score, use it as a cue to dig deeper into your processor setup, data completeness, or internal processes, and reach out to our team if you need help! 

Also, keep in mind that financial cost savings are only one part of the payments optimization story. Network tokenization and alternate debit routing can also increase your approval rates and reduce churn. While the current version of Opportunities focuses on dollars and cents, we’re working to bring those performance benefits into view too.

Ultimately, the Opportunities dashboard doesn’t just surface problems—it shows you what’s possible. If you’re ready to dig into what’s possible for your business, contact us today!