Get to Know Interchange Plus

Without an understanding of interchange fees, you have no basis from which to judge if your merchant account is priced competitively. Furthermore, you won’t know how different merchant account pricing models act upon interchange to yield vastly different processing fees.

Without sugar coating things, without understanding interchange you won’t be able to tell the difference between a great merchant account and a rip-off.

To drive the point home even further, I’ll relate interchange to a more common example. Picture yourself walking into a bank to get a loan without having any concept of how interest rates are set or what the prime rate is. How would you know if you’re being offered a good rate? You wouldn’t, and the same is true for interchange and merchant accounts when it comes to processing credit cards.

Interchange Fee Basics

• MasterCard and Visa are competing card associations and have different Interchange fee pricing and qualification schedules.
• MasterCard and Visa Interchange fees are the single largest component of your merchant discount rate pricing.
• All banks and merchant processing companies operate from the exact same Interchange fees, Dues and Assessment costs.
• Card Association Interchange is the fee paid by the merchant to the cardholder’s issuing bank for processing a transaction through the system.
• Interchange fees are priced at the transaction level and depends on the combination of your industry category code, the method by which you accept the card, the card product you accept and sometimes even varies by transaction size.
• You will likely have card transactions throughout any given day all qualifying at different Interchange fee levels.
• The Interchange pass through pricing model displayed on this site is by far your best option.  Don’t settle for any other rate structure – get all other comparative quotes on the Interchange pricing model.