General information about interchange

Credit cards in pocket

A lot of credit card processing does show up on your merchant statement, and it might be hard to learn how each of them works and their significance. You might be charged different amounts, but some of the fees listed are often the same. With the interchange the high risk credit card processing is possible without a lot of risk. One of the fees that will always make an appearance is interchange.

Interchange defined

holding credit card

Interchange takes into account a series of fees in which the card issuing bank gets paid on the transactions processed by the card. It isn’t a big deal for interchange to include 80 percent of the total amount merchants have to pay for credit card processing. Three components make up the merchant services which are the funding bank, the processing platform, and the merchant acquirer. Some businesses do have merchant accounts with merchant acquirer that enables them to accept customer’s credit and debit cards. The funding bank and the processing platform work in close collaboration with the merchant acquirer in ensuring that any every card transaction is completed.

Card offered

Banks offer their clients cards which are used in the different transaction, and therefore they take up a huge percentage of the fee charged to merchants on any given transaction. Issuing banks are paid a percentage of fees which is referred to as interchange.Also, the merchant’s acquirers are charged the interchange fees which are then passed to merchants in different forms. Here are some of the factors that determine the rate that should be applied to any transaction

The transaction size

If you are dealing with huge transactions, then you should be in for lower interchange rates.

The type 0f card

You will have to incur high interchange rates when using commercial cards or reward cards as opposed to debit cards.

The capturing of card data and the information obtained

Any transaction that is swiped especially in the case of EMV chip cards at the point of sale is likely to have low interchange rates compared to those that are entered online. Also, if you have data such as the cardholder’s zip code or the card CVV code you can be eligible to lower interchange costs.

The future of interchange

credit card

With interchange growing complexity and the advancements in technology, it is now easier for interchange to manage and implement a broad range of interchange specialized fees and rates by the merchant and card type. Additionally, with the new indicators built into the system interchange can not only manage the rates by merchant segmentation within the industry but also through market segmentation