--- title: How to Measure Your Financial Institution's Merchant-Services Program description: Revenue alone won’t show how your merchant-services program is performing. See the three bottom lines financial institutions should track to find growth. image: https://blog.payroc.com/hubfs/contactless-payment-checkout.jpg --- [Skip to Content](https://blog.payroc.com/your-merchant-services-program-has-more-than-one-bottom-line#main-content) ![USA - Current Region](https://payroc.com/wp-content/themes/payroc/assets/us-flag.svg) US - [![USA flag](https://payroc.com/wp-content/themes/payroc/assets/us-flag.svg) United States](https://payroc.com/) - [![Canada flag](https://payroc.com/wp-content/themes/payroc/assets/ca-flag.svg) Canada](https://payroc.com/en_ca/) [EN](https://payroc.com/en_ca/?utm_content=language-button) [FR](https://payroc.com/fr/?utm_content=language-button) - [![United Kingdom flag](https://payroc.com/wp-content/themes/payroc/assets/uk-flag.svg) United Kingdom](https://uk.payroc.com/) - [![Puerto Rico flag](https://payroc.com/wp-content/themes/payroc/assets/pr-flag.svg) Puerto Rico](https://dynamicspayments.com/) Partner‑Driven. 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[**B2B**](https://blog.payroc.com/tag/b2b) - [**Merchant & Business Owner**](https://blog.payroc.com/tag/merchant-business-owner) - [**Referral Partner**](https://blog.payroc.com/tag/referral-partner) - [**Education**](https://blog.payroc.com/tag/education) - [**Financial Institution**](https://blog.payroc.com/tag/financial-institution) ![contactless credit card payment](https://blog.payroc.com/hubfs/contactless-payment-checkout.jpg) Share this: - - - For financial institutions, merchant-services performance is often measured in the most obvious way: revenue. Is the program generating fee income? Is that income growing? Is the program contributing more to the institution’s overall Treasury Management Goals? Those are important questions, of course. But revenue alone can’t tell you whether your merchant-services program is reaching its full potential. It can add new merchants while quietly losing existing ones. And it can grow despite limited participation from the bankers and branches responsible for bringing merchant services into client conversations. To understand how a merchant-services program is really performing and where its next opportunities lie, your financial institution needs to look at several bottom lines. ## Bottom Line #1: Financial Performance Let’s start with the literal bottom line. Is your program generating meaningful and growing revenue? Total merchant-services revenue provides an important measure of performance, but it’s more useful when viewed alongside other indicators. How quickly is revenue growing? How much revenue does the average merchant generate? How much does merchant services contribute to non-interest income? And how much of that growth is coming from existing business clients versus newly acquired relationships? Looking at those measures together can help you distinguish between a program that’s simply producing revenue and one that’s building momentum. It can also reveal more questions worth investigating. If merchant count is increasing but revenue per merchant is declining, why? If revenue is flat despite a large business-client base, how much opportunity remains untapped? If revenue is growing, what’s driving that growth and can it be replicated? Revenue tells you what the program produced. It doesn’t necessarily tell you why it produced it or where the next opportunity lies. ## Bottom Line #2: Business-Client Adoption and Retention Merchant services can also tell you something about the depth of your business-client relationships. Consider a business that keeps its operating accounts, lending relationship, and other financial services with your institution but processes payments through another provider. Your institution may have the client relationship, but it’s capturing only part of the financial opportunity. That makes adoption of the existing business-client base an important measure of merchant-services performance. What percentage of eligible business clients use your merchant-services program? Where are the largest gaps? Are particular branches, markets, or client segments capturing more of the opportunity than others? Those questions shift the conversation from “How many merchants do we have?” to “How much of our existing business-client opportunity are we actually capturing?” Retention belongs in the same conversation. A program can appear healthy because it continues adding merchants, even as existing merchants leave. That revolving door can limit revenue growth while signaling problems with pricing, service, technology, or other parts of the merchant experience. Adoption shows whether you’re winning merchant relationships. Retention helps show whether you’re keeping them. Together, adoption and retention provide a clearer picture of whether merchant services is becoming a deeper part of your institution’s commercial relationships or remaining an underused offering alongside them. ## Bottom Line #3: Program Activation and Engagement Financial performance and client adoption tell you about results. Program activation can help explain what’s producing them. Even a competitive merchant-services offering can underperform if bankers aren’t consistently introducing it to clients. A financial institution may have thousands of potential merchant relationships already inside its business-client portfolio, but those opportunities are difficult to capture if merchant services isn’t part of the normal client conversation. That’s why program performance should also include measures such as banker and branch participation, referral activity, merchant activation, education and engagement, and leadership visibility. How many bankers are actively generating merchant-services referrals? Are referrals concentrated among a small group of high performers? Which branches are participating and which aren’t? Are bankers equipped to recognize a merchant-services opportunity and confidently start the conversation? Can leadership see where activity is translating into results? These measures can reveal something revenue alone can’t: whether growth is being driven by an engaged organization or occurring despite an under activated one. They can also point toward opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden. A low-performing market may not have a merchant-demand problem at all. It may have a participation problem. You can’t effectively manage the parts of a merchant-services program you can’t see. And it’s difficult to scale a program without understanding what’s driving or constraining its performance. ## Measure the Program You Actually Want to Grow Merchant services has more than one bottom line because its value extends beyond processing revenue. Financial performance tells you what your program is producing. Business-client adoption and retention show how much of the available relationship opportunity you’re capturing and keeping. Program activation and engagement help explain why you’re getting those results. The opportunity isn't simply to measure more. It's to understand how these measures work together and what they reveal about where your program can grow next. **Download the complimentary [Merchant-Services Benchmark Scorecard](https://partners.payroc.com/benchmark-your-program) for Financial Institutions** to help you evaluate the key indicators across financial performance, business-client adoption and retention, and program activation and engagement to identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities for growth. Don’t just measure merchant-services revenue. Benchmark the full program. ## Benchmark your full program Download the Merchant-Services Benchmark Scorecard to evaluate financial performance, client adoption and retention, and program engagement. 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