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Every small business owner is keenly aware of the costs of doing business.

One of those expenses is payment services – every time a customer pays, processing the payments costs money. And every small business owner would obviously like to pay as little as possible and get the best experience for that service.

But figuring out whether you’re paying too much can be a frustrating, time-consuming task. Comparing providers often means digging through dense merchant statements and weeks of back-and-forth conversations with a provider’s client services team.

And when you’re a small business owner, frankly, who has time for that?

That’s exactly the challenge that the U.S. Bank Merchant Payment Services (MPS) team set out to solve. If MPS could offer business owners a much better experience – one that’s less complicated, more accurate, faster and, most importantly, saves them money – it would be a tremendous value.

That’s where AI came in.

Building a better experience
Today, MPS client reps use an AI-powered tool called Statement Analyzer – nicknamed STAT – to quickly make sense of complex merchant statements with the help of AI, understand a business owner’s processing costs, and turn those insights into faster and more accurate pricing proposals.

STAT has completely transformed the client experience. What used to take weeks can now, in many cases, happen in a single meeting. Sales reps can walk business owners through clearer pricing options on the spot — making it faster, easier and more transparent.

And business owners have taken notice – moving millions of dollars in payments to MPS as a result. Last month, STAT processed more than 3,500 statements – and has processed more than 30,000 in the past year.

Developed in-house by U.S. Bank, STAT was first rolled out to MPS client reps in 2022. Last year, advances in the AI technology behind STAT took another big step forward. Instead of relying on traditional document scanning, the tool now uses AI that can visually understand different types of merchant statements — even poor‑quality and inconsistent ones. This made STAT more flexible and reliable in real‑world situations.

“For small business owners, time and clarity matter as much as cost,” said Pari Sawant, chief product officer for Merchant Payment Services at U.S. Bank. “By applying AI in a practical, human‑centered way, we’re removing complexity from payments, delivering transparent pricing in real time, and helping our teams show up with insights that genuinely make a difference for our clients.”

One early lesson was simple but important: real feedback matters. After the first version rolled out, client reps shared what worked and what didn’t. The team listened and made a bold decision to rebuild the tool, said Raj Bharadwaj, principal engineer for AI at U.S. Bank.

“We learned pretty quickly that you can’t just drop new technology into an old process and expect it to work,” he said. “We had to design the tool around how we can best serve small business owners.”