Swipesum launches CPO to fix merchant payments costs

Swipesum has launched CPO, its first product, combining software tools with a payments operations team.

The St. Louis company said the platform brings together Audit, Merchant Account, Gateway and Connect in a single payments command centre for businesses managing complex card processing arrangements. After spending the past decade as an outsourced payments adviser, Swipesum has now packaged that work into a product.

CPO enters the market as merchants face rising payment costs and closer scrutiny of card acceptance decisions. Swipesum pointed to record interchange charges, increasing network fees and the operational burden on mid-market businesses that often lack in-house payments specialists.

The launch also comes as the US card market could face changes if the Visa-Mastercard settlement is approved after a hearing later this month. That could force merchants to review which cards they accept and whether they apply surcharges, increasing demand for systems that analyse payment data and support operational changes.

At the centre of the offering is Swipesum Gateway, which uses Mastercard Merchant Cloud as part of its payment infrastructure. The gateway includes network tokenisation, credential lifecycle management, card vaulting and support for Level 2 and Level 3 data.

Alongside the gateway, Audit analyses merchant statements using artificial intelligence and benchmarks built from Swipesum's historical data. The tool is designed to identify interchange issues, pricing discrepancies, downgrades and residual payment errors, and is also available through an application programming interface.

Merchant Account is positioned as a provider-agnostic processing layer. It structures payment processing around a client's economics, system integrations and operational needs, while the audit tools continue to assess costs over time.

Connect is aimed at software companies, enterprise resource planning vendors and vertical software providers that want embedded payments. The managed PayFac service includes support for programme design, pricing and merchant onboarding.

The software is paired with a human operations team that renegotiates processing rates, restructures merchant accounts and implements payment changes identified by the platform. Customers also receive ongoing support through shared Slack channels.

Michael Seaman, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Swipesum, framed the launch as an attempt to move beyond software that only reports problems.

"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 the Chief Payments Officer," said Seaman.

"Most payments tools stop at telling a business what's wrong. CPO pairs that intelligence with a payments team that actually fixes it. And because we're provider-agnostic, the answer is always what's best for that business."

Customer demand

Swipesum is targeting a broad range of businesses, from small merchants to larger multi-site and business-to-business operators, though its pitch appears focused on organisations with enough payment volume and complexity to justify active optimisation. It argues that many merchants still rely on disconnected processors, acquirers and reporting tools, even as the card industry shifts towards tokenised transactions and more automated account updating.

That fragmentation has also created an opening for software providers that want to add payments to their products without building their own infrastructure. Swipesum said Connect is designed to let those companies offer embedded payments while outsourcing merchant onboarding, pricing and programme management.

One early partner cited by Swipesum is Terrier Technologies, whose ERP product Clypboard uses its payments setup.

"Our customers deserve options - regardless of the size of their business or payments team," said Dylan O'Donnell, President of Terrier Technologies.

He added: "Swipesum gives users of our flagship ERP Clypboard a modern payments platform backed by a team that puts customer service first."

Ten-year mark

The launch comes in Swipesum's tenth year in business. Founded in St. Louis, the company has operated as a payments software and services provider, advising merchants on processing costs, provider relationships and system design before packaging those services into a formal product suite.

The new offering reflects a wider push in payments to combine software with managed services, particularly in areas such as tokenisation, fraud controls and embedded finance, where merchants may lack specialist staff. Rather than positioning CPO as a standalone dashboard, Swipesum is presenting it as an operating layer for merchants and software platforms that need both data and execution.

The platform can identify an issue, quantify the opportunity and make the change, whether that means renegotiating rates, restructuring a merchant account, implementing network tokenisation or redesigning an embedded payments programme.