Avantis Direct is a UK-based online retailer turning over roughly £180k per month in card sales. After three years on Stripe, the team wanted to know whether they were paying a fair rate. We read their statement, ran the numbers, and migrated them across in under a fortnight.
Before
- Effective rate (all-in): 1.62%
- Settlement: T+2
- Monthly account / PCI fees: £32
- Premium-card surcharge: +0.5% on rewards and corporate cards
After (Monek IC++)
- Effective rate (all-in): 1.07%
- Settlement: Next working day
- Monthly account / PCI fees: £0
- Premium-card surcharge: None — passed through at true interchange
The numbers
At £180k/month of card volume, the headline rate change alone is saving Avantis around £990 per month, or £11,880 per year. Adding the removed monthly fees and the recovered premium-card surcharge brings total annual savings to just over £15,000 — a 34% reduction in payment costs.
What it took
The technical migration took six working days from initial statement read to first live transaction on Monek. Avantis runs WooCommerce, so the swap was a plug-in change rather than a developer integration. The Monek team handled the BACS bank-feed update and Stripe wind-down in parallel so there was no overlap in monthly fees.
"We had assumed we were getting a competitive rate because Stripe is the default. We were wrong by about a third. The hardest part of switching turned out to be admitting that." — Finance Director, Avantis Direct