tessera
tessera
Your donors gave. Your systems didn’t keep it all.
Nonprofits processing donations electronically lose between 0.5% and 2% of gross donation volume each year — not from donor disengagement, but from recurring gift lapses, authorization failures, merchant misclassification, and processor fees that go unexamined. For an organization processing $10M annually, that is $50,000–$200,000 in recoverable revenue. tessera quantifies that gap and provides a sequenced roadmap to close it — on a success-fee basis, so there is no cost unless we find savings.
How it works
01 — The diagnostic
We examine eight areas of your payment infrastructure — recurring gift logic, authorization rates, merchant classification, fee structures, disputes, cross-border costs, payment rails, and channel mix. Each produces a quantified finding with a dollar value attached.
02 — The roadmap
Every finding becomes a prioritized action item. tessera delivers a sequenced implementation plan your team can act on directly — ranked by recovery potential, complexity, and time to impact. No retainer. No ongoing dependency. You own the roadmap.
03 — Quarterly measurement
tessera tracks what moves each quarter — authorization rate changes, fee reductions, recovered recurring revenue — and provides a plain-language update tying each result back to the original finding. Because the engagement is success-fee based, our incentives stay aligned with yours throughout.
Who this is for
tessera works with nonprofits that already have a payments operation — organizations processing $5M or more annually in donations, memberships, or program fees. You’re the right fit if you have a finance or operations leader who owns payment infrastructure but lacks a dedicated payments team, if you’ve never had your payment stack independently reviewed, or if you suspect your current setup is costing you more than it should.
About the founder
tessera is led by Matt Bethell, a payments strategist with ten years of experience governing payment infrastructure at scale. As Director of Enterprise Payments at LVMH, Matt oversaw $20B+ in annual card volume and led negotiations with global card networks that delivered $8.1M in annual cost reduction. Before that, he spent four years at Auriemma Consulting Group benchmarking payment economics across issuers and merchants, and advised global financial institutions and digital platforms at Accenture on payments modernization and network strategy. He brings the same analytical discipline — applied to authorization rates, fee structures, network economics, and recurring revenue — to nonprofits that have never had an independent payments review.