In the fintech evolution, few revolutions have reshaped the financial stack quite like Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) and embedded finance. Today, every tech company wants to act like a fintech company—and with good reason. According to Aite-Novarica, 82% of Europe’s fintechs now rely on BaaS providers, which enable an average of 45% of their revenues. Yet under the sleek interface of frictionless card experiences and invisible payments lies a messier reality: fragile infrastructure, regulatory complexity, and, critically, the opaque cost of card scheme fees.

The Rise (and Risk) of BaaS

The BaaS landscape is booming, with players like Swan, Weavr, and Modulr enabling fintechs, SaaS companies, and marketplaces to launch payment, lending, or card services at speed. Yet, what began as a promise of instant innovation has shown signs of structural strain:

• Product delays: 1 in 5 fintechs lose $11M annually due to their BaaS provider’s inefficiencies.

• Outages and compliance issues: 40% have experienced service failures; 20% faced regulatory action.

• Customer churn: A third of fintechs have lost customers due to poor BaaS performance.
  
  

Add to this the layered nature of most solutions—where partner banks, API aggregators, KYC/KYB vendors, and scheme connectors stack up—and it becomes clear: embedded finance may be seamless on the surface, but the back-end is anything but.

Embedded Finance: Ubiquity with Accountability

As Uber made payments disappear, the bar for all platforms rose. Now, spend management tools, marketplaces, and SaaS platforms expect not just payment features—but financial-grade reliability. This is especially true in the Nordics, where companies like Mynt, Intergiro, Svea, and Enfuce are helping businesses add embedded finance features across lending, insurance, and card issuing.

But where it gets complicated is in the compliance, reconciliation, and cost management of these features. In particular, as companies go multi-product (cards, accounts, lending), the intricacy of managing partner banks, scheme fees, and internal operations balloons.

And that's where one cost center looms largest—and is least understood

The Hidden Cost of Card Payments: Scheme Fees

Card payments generate more than $500B in global revenues annually, growing at 11% year-on-year. Yet for many card issuers and acquirers, profitability remains elusive. Why? Scheme fees.

Scheme fees charged by Visa and Mastercard can make up 70-80% of transaction costs. They are:

• Discreetly billed and highly complex

• Constantly changing with little transparency

• Often analyzed manually or through in-house, Excel-based tools
  
  

This problem is compounded for mid-sized issuers and acquirers who lack the internal expertise or budget to build robust scheme fee optimization tools — many of whom only realize they’re overpaying after the fact. The result? An estimated $13 billion lost annually in poor fee management.

Where the Industry Goes from Here

As embedded finance matures and regulators begin tightening the reins on BaaS providers, there’s a growing recognition that real value lies not just in offering cards—but in running them profitably.

This shift requires a new class of fintech infrastructure: one that brings intelligence, automation, and profitability tools to the card stack. One that doesn’t just promise smarter decisions, but proves them

Introducing Torus: From Unseen Costs to Measurable Profits

Enter Torus—a company Goose Valley Ventures is proud to back. 

Why We Backed Torus

At Goose Valley, we look for founders who tackle invisible inefficiencies in massive markets—and turn them into structured advantage. Card payments are a $500B engine, yet most issuers still rely on spreadsheets to manage their biggest cost line.

Torus stood out with a clear value prop, rapid implementation, and real ROI: enabling clients to recover millions in hidden fees while building long-term margin control. In a market where embedded finance is becoming ubiquitous, Torus enables something rarer: sustainable profitability.

Torus is a SaaS intelligence platform built specifically for banks, BaaS providers, paytechs — and, more recently, for merchants (Read more here). Its mission? Help card payment players enhance profits by up to 50% through better control and prediction of scheme fees and reached 98% accuracy in predicting costs that used to be hidden.

Unlike traditional solutions that rely on manual reconciliation or expensive custom builds, Torus offers:

• End-to-end scheme fee analysis and optimization

• What-if modeling, reconciliation tools, and predictive analytics

• Productized knowledge built from 100+ years of card payments experience

• A client base already spanning Europe and Asia, with proven ROI and traction

“Regulators are beginning to look under the hood — not just of embedded finance, but of the entire card payments stack. And what they’re finding is often messy: fee opacity, reconciliation gaps, misaligned incentives. Scheme fees sit at the heart of this mess. With Torus, we give our clients something they’ve never had before: cost clarity, margin control, and real predictive power.” Kirill Lisitsyn, CEO & Co-Founder of Torus

For mid-sized issuers, merchant acquirers, and BaaS providers navigating a low-margin, high-volume game, Torus represents a rare opportunity: profitability not just through scale, but through intelligence.

“Torus was built to integrate without intrusion. Clients stay in control of their data — we only process what’s needed, securely and transparently. No black boxes. Just powerful analytics, delivered on your terms.” Sergey Lebedev, CPO & Co-Founder of Torus

As embedded finance continues to expand and card volumes grow, players who understand—and control—the costs under the hood will have the edge. And Torus is here to give them that control.

Want to know what your scheme fees are really costing you? You might just find the answer with Torus.