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Payments may be managed in silos. Their impact shows up across the P&L.
Enterprise merchants face pressure to grow revenue, protect margins, and improve customer experience. Payments performance can influence all of those outcomes, but only when merchants can connect transaction signals to business impact.
Authorization rates, cost per transaction, fraud decisions, and chargebacks each represent places where small performance gaps have outsized business consequences. These areas are often managed separately, even though they can directly influence one another. When teams optimize in isolation, opportunities get harder to see and prioritize.
Our Performance Consulting team starts with performance, not a product pitch: helping merchants identify which signals matter most and act on them to unlock value across the payments stack.
No single metric tells the full story.
A merchant may see overall performance that looks healthy while a specific issuer, payment method, or market is quietly underperforming. Another merchant may be paying more than needed because certain transaction data is not being passed consistently.
Viewed separately, these can look like isolated issues. Viewed together, they show where value is leaking and which opportunities may be worth acting on.
That is where quantification matters. Most payments teams know optimization is important. The harder question is what the opportunity is worth. When merchants connect payments data to business outcomes, they can stop optimizing the metric that is easiest to see and start acting on the opportunities with the greatest returns.
Authorization offers a clear example of how payments performance can translate directly into revenue. PayPal brings a broader view of buyer and transaction signals, paired with authorization tools built for continuous optimization, including Network Tokens, Smart Retries, and Account Updater. The result: globally, card processing authorization rates through PayPal Enterprise Payments are up to 5 percentage points higher than the market average among large enterprises.1
For Grubhub, that improvement was tied to measurable business impact. After implementing PayPal Enterprise Payments authorization and optimization tools, Grubhub saw a 250 basis point card authorization rate uplift contributing to an estimated $89.4 million increase in revenue. On U.S. subscription transactions, Grubhub also saw a 25% authorization rate boost with PayPal.2 [Read the full story.]
Authorization is one example. Cost signals may point to interchange savings or Optimized Debit Routing opportunities that automatically route eligible debit transactions over the lowest-cost network, reducing costs without sacrificing auth rates. Fraud signals may show where risk controls can better protect approvals without increasing exposure, from upstream fraud intelligence to block bad actors early to downstream dispute automation to win back revenue. Similar payments optimization opportunities can appear wherever payment decisions influence approval, cost, risk, or recovery.
Technology can surface where payments performance is changing. Understanding what to do about it is where the harder work starts.
For enterprise merchants, the answer depends on context: transaction mix, issuer patterns, risk tolerance, customer behavior, and business priorities. The same pattern that signals an opportunity for one merchant may reflect an intentional tradeoff for another. That is where data-driven insight and human expertise make a difference.
PayPal’s Performance Consulting team works directly with merchants to identify performance gaps, quantify the potential return, and help prioritize where to act. This is not a generic audit. It is a prioritized view of where payments performance may be creating or limiting value, grounded in how the business actually operates.
PayPal helps enterprise merchants connect those insights to action through optimization capabilities and broader transaction intelligence. The goal is not more data. It is better decisions across more transactions, continuously.
The hidden ROI may already be in your payments stack. The opportunity is finding it, quantifying it, and acting with confidence.
Want to understand what is possible in your stack? Connect with your PayPal Account Manager.