B2B Payments
February 28, 2019
Visa & Mastercard 2019 Rate Increases
Visa, Mastercard, and Discover raised processing fees in April 2019—see what changed, how it affects merchants, and what you can do to offset higher costs.
Interchange and network fees are one of the biggest drivers of what merchants actually pay to accept cards, and they change on a set schedule set by the card networks rather than by any individual processor. Below is the original 2019 announcement of one such increase, which illustrates how these adjustments typically work and why they matter for any business that accepts credit or debit cards.
Credit card companies Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, will raise their processing fees in April 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Card network fee increases like this one are typically passed through to merchants via their processor, often as a small percentage or per-transaction bump buried in a monthly statement. Because networks update rates twice a year, in April and October, the cumulative effect over several years can meaningfully change a merchant's effective processing cost — even if no single increase looks dramatic on its own. Reviewing a current merchant statement against the latest published network rates is the most reliable way to see whether a business is absorbing these increases unnecessarily, or whether its processor is passing along more than the networks actually charge.
CARDZ3N helps merchants audit their statements against current interchange and assessment schedules, and can often find savings that offset network-driven rate increases like this one. Contact us for a free statement review.
Start protecting your revenue from chargebacks today — schedule your complimentary consultation with CARDZ3N’s dispute management specialists.