In an ever-changing landscape, keep ahead of the curve with insights and industry news from Optimized Payments.
Author: Alan Vickness Merchants are waiting on “PINs” and needles, counting down the days until they can take advantage of the Federal Reserve’s Regulation II debit rule clarification July 1st deadline. This ruling was passed last October 2022 and has already...
As with everything else, COVID has taken its toll on the payments industry. We have seen restaurants, hotels, travel agencies, and retail volumes plummet due to lockdowns and customer behavior. For many industries, COVID has increased volumes in their higher cost...
The Payment Brand updates notification distributed recently by your acquirer has several very important updates that will require your immediate attention. The notice consists largely of interchange and fee structure changes, several new interchange and fee increases...
As many of you are beginning to review your merchant statements from July 2020, you might be noticing some new categories from Visa cards. While Visa announced that it would be pushing their previously released updates for April/July 2020 to April 2021 due to COVID,...
Over the years, we have seen many increases in interchange fees. Every 6-12 months, Visa/MC will pinpoint specific interchange rates that they choose to go up or down (mostly up). These increases usually apply to only a few categories each release, and they are fairly straightforward to forecast the cost impacts. For example, in October 2017, Visa increased Commercial Card Not Present Purchasing and Corporate cards from 2.65% to 2.70%. For most merchants, this was not a major increase (only 5 basis-points) as it only applied to these specific card types and only on CNP sales missing Level 2 data. To quantify financial impact, all a merchant would need to do is look up their historical volumes for these rates, and multiply by the 0.05% increase. Pretty simple…
But behind the scenes, a much larger impact to merchant costs have been occurring and you may not have even noticed it.
It’s that time of year again. No, we do not mean tax season. This is what people in the payments world call “Regs Season”. “Regs” is a semi-annual Regulatory Release update which all the major card networks (Visa, MC, Discover, Amex) coordinate to provide a single...
