About us
A payments practice that reads statements for a living
EY Loma Solutions works with merchants on the cost, compliance and data of card acceptance — from single-location restaurants to high-risk categories other acquirers decline.
The merchant services industry is built on an information gap. Card acceptance is genuinely complicated — interchange runs to hundreds of categories, qualification rules change annually, and the statement a merchant receives is designed to be difficult to decompose. That complexity is where margin hides.
Our work is to close that gap for the merchant. We derive your effective rate, separate the fixed components you cannot negotiate from the processor margin you can, and structure acceptance so the cost either drops or moves off your P&L entirely under a compliant cash-discount or surcharge program.
For merchants in high-risk categories, the work is different in kind. A decline is usually a documentation failure rather than a judgment about the business, so we rebuild the underwriting file against the acquirer's actual objection and negotiate reserve terms before signature — the only point at which they are negotiable.
And because we already see settled volume, we can do two things most processors cannot: return that data as operating insight for hospitality operators, and underwrite working capital against revenue that is observable rather than projected.
The same logic extends into software. We build custom CRM systems for small and mid-sized businesses with payments inside the workflow — quoting, invoicing, recurring billing and card acceptance in one system rather than four, settling on the processing account we already run. Because the CRM and the merchant account are a single engagement, reconciliation stops being a monthly spreadsheet exercise.
Leadership
A small practice, deliberately. The person who reads your statements is the person you talk to.
Managing Partner
Derek Beckmann
Derek Beckmann leads EY Loma Solutions as Managing Partner, where his work sits at the intersection of payment economics and the software that runs on top of them. His consulting practice is built on a single conviction: that the cost of accepting a card is knowable, and that most merchants overpay because the statement is designed to make the arithmetic hard rather than because the market is efficient.
He advises operators on interchange qualification, compliant cash-discount and surcharge structures, and high-risk underwriting — the categories where an acquirer's decline is a documentation problem wearing a category label. That work is deliberately unglamorous: reading statements line by line, separating the components a merchant cannot negotiate from the margin they can, and reconstructing underwriting files against the objection an acquirer actually raised rather than the one it stated.
Alongside the advisory practice he directs the firm's software engagements, building custom CRM systems for small and mid-sized businesses with payments embedded in the workflow rather than bolted alongside it. He takes the view that the seam between a company's customer records and its money movement is where most operational cost hides, and that closing it is an engineering problem rather than a licensing one — which is why those builds are delivered with source code and full data export rather than as a platform a client can never leave.
He is a persistent advocate for telling merchants to stay put when their pricing is already competitive, on the grounds that a practice which never reaches that conclusion is not really reviewing anything. He works from Chicago.
Where we are
Lovingly created in Chicago
The company and all of its software are lovingly created in Chicago. Every CRM we build, every analytics tool we ship and every line of code behind them is designed and written here by our own people.
That is a deliberate operating choice rather than a marketing line. Custom software for a business that runs an unusual process requires sitting with the people who do the work and understanding why they do it that way — which is difficult to do across a timezone gap and impossible to do through a reseller. Nothing we deliver is offshored, and nothing is white-labeled from another company's platform and presented as ours.
We serve merchants across the United States from here, and we do not claim local offices we do not have. What travels is the work, not the pretense.
How we work
Show the arithmetic
Every recommendation we make is reducible to a number you can check yourself. If we cannot show you the derivation, we have not finished the work.
Compliance is the product
Zero-cost processing works because the disclosure, ceilings and debit handling are correct. Providers who treat those as paperwork are selling you a program with an expiry date.
Tell merchants to stay
A meaningful share of the statements we review are already competitively priced. We say so. A practice that never reaches that conclusion is not reviewing anything.
No contract as leverage
No long-term processing agreement and no cancellation fee. If the pricing stops being competitive, leaving should be easy — that is what keeps us honest.
Tell us how your business actually runs.
A scoping conversation costs nothing and ends with a straight answer on whether a custom build is worth it — and what your card acceptance should cost.