The idea for Unetix came from a conversation between the three of us, co-founders with 45+ years combined experience across senior commercial, product, and risk backgrounds in the payments industry. We’ve spent those years listening to the challenges our customers faced, understanding their pain points first-hand, and often wishing we could do more to help them beyond the constraints of the organisations we were part of – Now we can.
What we’d heard consistently across all those customer conversations was that businesses are making critical payment decisions with incomplete information, and there’s no good reason for it in 2025. What we’ve seen is that the complexity isn’t just about managing multiple payment providers, though that certainly adds to it. It’s about understanding the lifecycle of a single transaction, which can span 3-6 months and generate multiple data points across different files, APIs, and reporting structures. Even businesses with just one acquirer struggle to piece together the full picture when authorisation data lives in one place, settlement in another, chargebacks in a third, and scheme fees arrive weeks later in a format that doesn’t easily reconcile with anything else.
And when you do add that second or third provider, whether for resilience, regional optimisation, or cost management, the complexity multiplies in ways that make it nearly impossible to maintain visibility without significant internal resource dedicated to making sense of it all.
And that’s what excited us about building Unetix (Unetix = Unified.Metrics.)
The Pattern We Keep Seeing
From our experience across different businesses and payment volumes, the pattern is remarkably consistent: the moment you add a second payment provider, your visibility fragments in ways that are difficult to repair without significant internal investment.
You’re suddenly managing different dashboards with different definitions of what “performance” even means, multiple data files in formats that don’t align, manual reconciliation work that consumes hours every week, and compliance monitoring that becomes exponentially more complex because you’re tracking thresholds and scheme rules across multiple reporting structures. And perhaps most importantly, you have no benchmark context. No way to know whether a 2.3% decline rate for Visa transactions in France is competitive, terrible, or somewhere in between.
What we’ve seen is that each provider will happily show you their slice of your payment data, but they’re not incentivised to tell you when another provider is outperforming them, when you’re paying more than market rates, or when there are patterns across your payment stack that only become visible when you look at everything together. It’s not malicious. It’s just the nature of how the ecosystem is structured.
The Build-or-Accept Dilemma
When businesses recognise this gap, they typically consider building something internally, and from our experience, that’s where things get interesting. And by interesting, we mean expensive and usually unsuccessful.
Building payment intelligence in-house requires rare domain expertise (payments people who can also architect data systems), continuous maintenance as banks and schemes evolve their formats and rules, and it inevitably competes for engineering resources against everything else the business needs to deliver. What we’ve seen is that most internal projects either stall indefinitely because the expertise isn’t available or the priority shifts, or they do get built but become legacy burdens within 18 months because maintaining them requires dedicated resource that no one wants to allocate.
And even if you succeed in building it, you’re still missing the critical context that only comes from collective intelligence: how does your performance compare to the market? Is your authorisation rate for UK Mastercard debit genuinely strong, or are you underperforming and don’t know it? Without anonymised benchmarking across multiple businesses, you’re making decisions in a vacuum.
That’s the question that kept coming up in our conversations with business owners who’d been through major payment projects: if they could do it again, having internal payment intelligence would be essential. Not as a dashboard tool, but as what one of them described as a “Chief Payments Officer as a platform.” The ability to interrogate your payment data, understand the why behind the numbers, and make genuinely data-led decisions rather than relying on what your PSP’s account manager tells you.
Why Unetix Exists (And Why We’re Excited About It)
For us, this was about combining a few things we’re genuinely passionate about: the deep understanding of payment industry pains, a love of data and getting to the “why” behind what’s happening in transaction flows, and the opportunity to build something unique and independent that can deliver real value to businesses across the UK and EU markets.
Unetix incorporates a vision we’d each been circling around independently. Businesses should have access to payment lifecycle intelligence without needing to build it themselves, without conflicts of interest from providers who route transactions, and with the market context that makes the data genuinely actionable. And importantly, it gives us the building blocks to realise the rest of that vision as we grow.
We’re building this as an independent platform because independence is the only way it works properly. We don’t route payments, we don’t favour specific providers, we don’t have referral arrangements that bias our analysis. When we tell you that Acquirer A is underperforming relative to Acquirer B for a specific card type and geography, it’s because that’s what the data shows. Not because we have a commercial interest in moving your volume.
What we’ve seen is that businesses processing £100K to £50M in card turnover typically have between two and five payment providers in their stack, and they’re almost always managing that complexity with a combination of provider dashboards, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge that lives in someone’s head. That’s not a sustainable or scalable way to run payments in 2025, particularly when compliance requirements continue to tighten and the cost of getting it wrong can be substantial. Whether that’s breaching scheme thresholds, missing reconciliation variances, or just overpaying for your payment processing.
What Makes This Different
The thing that genuinely excites us about Unetix is that we’re solving a problem we’ve personally experienced, and we’re doing it in a way that’s accessible to businesses that aren’t enterprise-scale. You shouldn’t need a six-figure budget and a six-month implementation to get the required visibility into your payment data – You can be live in 30 minutes. For custom data files, we can map them in minutes. The intelligence should be immediate, not eventual.
And because we’re purpose-built for payment lifecycle intelligence (not a generic BI tool trying to handle payments as an afterthought, not an orchestration platform with analytics bolted on), we can move faster, go deeper, and deliver value that’s specific to the problems payment professionals actually face day-to-day.
The anonymised benchmarking aspect is something we’re particularly excited about because it creates network effects: the more businesses using Unetix, the richer the benchmark context becomes, and everyone benefits from collective intelligence without exposing their competitive data. It’s the difference between knowing you have a 2.1% decline rate (which tells you nothing) and knowing you’re in the 65th percentile for your MCC and geography (which tells you there’s likely room for improvement and where to look).
What’s Coming Next
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more about the specific problems Unetix solves and the thinking behind our approach, particularly for the UK and EU markets where we’re focusing our launch efforts:
- How we handle data security and privacy whilst enabling market benchmarking (spoiler: full isolation with anonymised aggregation)
- Why independence is the only model that works for post-transaction intelligence
- The hidden costs most businesses don’t realise they’re paying across their payment stack
- How to think about payments as a strategic advantage rather than just operational overhead
From our experience, businesses that treat payment data as a strategic asset rather than an operational necessity tend to outperform their competitors. Better authorisation rates, lower costs, fewer compliance headaches. Unetix exists to make that accessible without requiring you to build a payment intelligence function internally.
If you’re managing multiple payment providers and wondering whether there’s a better way to get visibility and control, we’d genuinely love to show you what we’ve built.
Ready to see your payment data unified? Visit unetix.ai or get in touch to learn more.
