Confidential · Prepared for Investor Review in partnership with Michael Smith Liss
Three months. Nine payment methods. Eighty-two thousand transactions. Here is what the data reveals — and what Create × Echelon does differently.
Every dollar, every card brand, every settled batch — pulled directly from the reconciliation ledger. No rounding, no selection bias.
Each of these is pulled directly from the 90-day dataset. Each is something a well-run processing relationship should surface and solve.
With 27% of volume running on tokenized wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay) and BNPL — categories with favorable interchange — this card mix is worth examining under an interchange-plus structure to see what the actual cost breakdown looks like versus a tiered or bundled plan.
14,535 transactions sit in Pending at report time — roughly 5.8% of total transaction records. In an ecommerce business, that's working capital lagging behind the cart. Create's real-time settlement dashboard surfaces every pending batch before it lags.
The 2.92% refund rate is normal for apparel. Worth noting: Visa and Mastercard both run return-interchange programs that refund a portion of interchange paid on transactions that are later refunded within a qualifying window. Enrollment eligibility and recovery amounts vary by program and volume.
66 disputes opened, 50 won. Strong defense. The bigger lever is prevention — AVS + CVV matching combined with 3-D Secure 2.0 liability shift turns cardholder fraud from a chasing game into a non-event.
None of these are theoretical. Each one is already standard operating practice inside the Create × Echelon book — and each one maps directly to a line item in the 90-day data.
Every CNP transaction that ships without full AVS + CVV match drops a tier — often silently. The resulting interchange downgrade can add 30–80 basis points per transaction. Create enforces full-match routing at the gateway level, keeps transactions in the best-qualified bucket, and visualizes downgrade rate as a first-class metric.
Visa and Mastercard both run return-interchange programs that refund a portion of the interchange originally paid when a transaction is later refunded within a qualifying window. Most merchants are never enrolled. With $224K in 90-day refund volume, enrollment eligibility is worth a formal review.
14,535 pending transactions at report time is cash that hasn't funded. Create's dashboard surfaces every pending batch the moment it lags — no waiting for the next reconciliation file. Faster funding curves reduce working-capital strain, which matters more to an apparel business than a basis-point conversation.
A 76% win rate is strong — but every represented dispute costs staff time, issuer fees, and customer friction. AVS hygiene + 3-D Secure 2.0 liability shift (next section) move fraud from reactive defense to prevented-at-the-gate. The dispute volume itself goes down.
Online apparel attracts fraud — card-testing, account takeover, and friendly-fraud chargebacks. Every Create merchant runs on the same four-layer stack. Every layer exists upstream of the chargeback itself.
Billing address must match cardholder-on-file. A fail returns a soft signal that can route the transaction into the downgrade bucket — or block it before authorization.
The card-security-code test. Standard for any CNP acceptance. Create enforces a CVV match requirement at the gateway layer and surfaces CVV-mismatch attempts as a velocity signal.
The authentication protocol used by Verified by Visa, Mastercard Identity Check, Amex SafeKey, and Discover ProtectBuy. Passes biometric and device-fingerprint data to the issuer in-stream. A successful 3DS2 authentication transfers fraud liability from the merchant to the issuing bank.
Cross-border cards carry higher interchange and higher fraud exposure. Create routes international BINs through risk-adjusted rails, enforces 3DS2, and surfaces cross-border issuing country on every transaction.
Every fraud-category chargeback on a 3DS2-authenticated transaction shifts liability to the issuing bank. For a merchant in apparel — where friendly fraud is a meaningful share of dispute volume — this flips the dispute economics entirely.
Adjust monthly volume below. The annualized savings update live, calculated against the current effective-rate baseline from the 90-day data.
Methodology: the current-state effective rate is derived from the observed 90-day data (3.27% of volume in fees). Projected savings are modeled on an interchange-plus structure with a 0.45% spread over a 2.35% blended interchange floor — reflecting weighted average published interchange for this card mix plus internal cost components. Figures are directional estimates.
Neither product stands alone. The partnership is the product: a modern merchant platform on top of an institutional-grade processor.
One merchant relationship. Two companies, each best in their lane.
Every batch, every pending transaction, every refund, visible the moment it exists. No lag between ledger and decision.
Always-on phone, chat, and email coverage staffed by real people. Not a ticket queue. Through onboarding, chargebacks, and every batch in between.
Managed dispute workflow with representment built in. Create runs the evidence packet, tracks win rate, and reports recovered revenue, not just filed cases.
Interchange-plus, line-itemed, no bucket math. The merchant sees what each transaction actually costs and why.
Direct relationships with card networks and the acquiring bank. Not a reseller layer. The processing itself.
Risk and compliance expertise that reads a merchant's history in context, not by algorithm alone. Faster, cleaner approvals.
PCI, AML, OFAC, high-risk vertical boarding. The regulatory layer that keeps a processing relationship operating cleanly at scale.
A 30-year operating history. The stability a multi-billion dollar portfolio expects of the processor sitting beneath every card swipe.
Every number in this proposal is pulled directly from the reconciliation ledger — no smoothing, no selection, no rounding. The strategies are standard Create operating practice. The projected savings are Create economics applied to observed volume.
We'd like to walk through it together.
Create Group Capital, LLC, doing business as Go Create Payments. Payment processing provided by Echelon Payment Solutions Group.