1. Merchants Against Unfair Interchange Practices ~ Call To Action ~ The Credit Card Act of 2009 protects consumers, BUT NOT MERCHANTS , from unfair interchange practices of banks and processors.
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4. Unregulated Interchange fees are imposed by credit card companies and issuing banks under the pretense of processing credit and debit card transactions. However, these fees have tripled in the United States since 2001, to $48 billion in 2008, despite advances in technology that have reduced other comparable transactional costs. Today, for most retailers, the cost of processing paper checks is less than the cost of accepting credit and debit cards.
5. For one example of how Interchange functions, imagine a consumer making a $100 purchase with a credit card. For that $100 item, the retailer would get approximately $98. The remaining $2, known as the merchant discount and fees , gets divided up. About $1.75 would go to the card issuing bank (defined as interchange), $0.18 would go to Visa or MasterCard association (defined as assessments), and the remaining $0.07 would go to the retailer's merchant account provider.
6. Visa/MasterCard apply over 200 Interchange categories based on type of card, business nature, transaction type, card issuer, and many more. Every April and October the Visa/MasterCard associations re-adjust all or some of these 200 Interchange categories and these new interchange rates will strike each merchant and transaction in a different range according to the category.
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8. Processors don’t take the time to watch: Interchange Rules Compliance Merchant ID Categories Back-end Acquirer Card Associations Issuing Banks … and more We optimize Interchange through the ‘ Programmable Tier’… Typically 8-20% Cost Reduction
9. But What About “Interchange Plus”? Interchange Pass-Through can be completely transparent * Interchange Wholesales + 2 bits for the processor *** They ‘Set it and forget it’ But … Who’s Optimizing the 200+ Interchange Categories?