Risk & payments advisory for online marketing
You can win the auction, the creative and the funnel, and still lose the money at authorization. Omia Consulting builds the other half of the business: payment infrastructure that scales with spend, risk controls acquirers actually accept, and a dispute program that keeps you out of monitoring.
Diagnosis
Four places where scaling online marketing quietly turns into a payments problem.
A three-point drop in approval rate is a three-point drop in revenue — and it never appears in your ad dashboard. Issuer soft declines, blunt retry logic, missing network tokens, a descriptor nobody recognises on the statement. Most of it is recoverable without adding a dollar of acquisition spend.
Chargebacks are a compliance problem before they are a finance problem. Once a monitoring program picks you up, the fines are the cheap part. The expensive part is an acquirer that stops answering the phone, a rolling reserve that doubles, and a remediation plan due in thirty days.
One MID, one PSP, one underwriting committee. A business built over three years can be offline by Tuesday because a single risk analyst re-read your refund policy. Redundancy is cheap before you need it and unbuyable afterwards.
Underwriting is not a form, it is a reading of your marketing. Claims, creatives, trial mechanics, the cancellation flow and your traffic mix decide whether you are approved, what reserve you carry and what rate you pay. That review should happen on your side of the table first.
What we do
Payment architecture
PSP and acquirer selection, MID structure, smart routing and cascading, descriptor strategy, settlement and reserve terms — designed for the volume you plan to do, not the volume you did last year.
Approval rate
Decline-code forensics down to issuer and BIN level, retry and dunning schedules, 3-D Secure and SCA exemption strategy, network tokens and account updater, recovery flows for continuity models.
Disputes
Prevention alerts and deflection, representment quality and win-rate review, ratio forecasting against scheme thresholds, and a documented exit plan when a portfolio is already inside a monitoring program.
Compliance
Card-scheme rule mapping, monitoring-program readiness, subscription and negative-option requirements, disclosure and cancellation standards, and the KYC/AML posture your acquirer expects to see written down.
Fraud & risk stack
Rules versus models, vendor selection and honest benchmarking, manual review workflow, velocity and affiliate-level scoring, and false-positive analysis that puts a price on every rule you keep.
Marketing & risk alignment
Landing pages, claims, price presentation, trial-to-bill mechanics, affiliate traffic quality and partner terms — assessed against scheme rules and acquirer appetite before they become a remediation notice.
Where we stand
Independence is the product. These are the lines that keep the advice worth paying for.
We don't sell MIDs. We are not a broker and we hold no merchant accounts. When someone offers you a gateway and advice in the same conversation, only one of them is actually free.
We don't take vendor commissions. No referral fees from PSPs, acquirers or fraud vendors. You pay us, so the recommendation has exactly one client inside it.
We don't help you hide. Transaction laundering, mismatched descriptors, disguised business models and split-MID games end the same way every time. We build the version that survives an audit.
We don't hand over a deck and leave. Every recommendation carries an owner, a date and a number to measure it by. If it cannot be measured, we did not recommend it.
Engagement models
Diagnostic sprint
A time-boxed audit of processing, disputes and compliance exposure. Fixed fee, fixed scope, one document at the end.
Advisory retainer
Monthly hours for architecture decisions, vendor calls, escalations and reporting. Thirty days' notice, both ways.
Interim leadership
Part-time senior ownership of the payments and risk function while you build the team — including hiring the person who replaces us.
Deal support
Payments diligence for acquisitions and investments, PSP tenders, acquirer negotiations, and remediation plans for schemes or regulators.
Sectors we know well
Gaming & entertainment Travel D2C e-commerce Lead gen & affiliate networks Subscription & continuityBefore the first call
Yes, and speed matters more than scope. The first week is triage: understand the stated reason, secure settlement of held funds, stand up interim processing, and build an onboarding file that answers the objection instead of repeating it. Architecture work comes after the revenue is flowing again.
Twelve months of transaction and settlement reports, decline-code breakdowns, dispute and representment history, current PSP and acquirer agreements, and access to the live funnel. Under NDA, read-only, and from exports rather than production access wherever that is possible.
No — we make it faster. Most clients have capable people who are missing acquirer-side context, benchmark data, or the leverage a third party brings to a negotiation. Where there is no team yet, we run the function on an interim basis and hand it over.
Fixed fee for diagnostics and design, monthly retainer for ongoing work, day rate for deal support. No commissions, no revenue share on recovered volume, no percentage of disputes won — incentives that would quietly rewrite the advice.
Card acquiring across Europe, the UK and North America, plus alternative payment methods and local acquiring where a market demands it. Where a market sits outside our experience we say so, and point you at someone who knows it.