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...
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In an ever-changing landscape, keep ahead of the curve with insights and industry news from Optimized Payments.
Latest News from Card Brand Updates
New Payment Brand Updates
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...
Visa EIRF is Gone Forever (…sort of), Visa Business B2B Eliminated
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,...
Premium and Super Premium Cards – The Silent Killers
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.
Payments are Constantly Changing – April 2018 Regs Release Highlights
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...
MasterCard Increasing Assessments to 0.12% for Large Tickets
There is no business reason for this increase (increased risk, increased costs, etc.) other than fatter profits for MC. If there was a business rationale for this assessment increase, MC hasn’t articulated it. This further speaks to government regulation… Effective...
Interchange Updates & Review for 2nd Half of 2010
Every year card networks and issuers present some increases to their dues, assessments, and/or interchange fee schedules. 2010 was no exception…the most significant changes from the second half of last year are summarized below. Note that if there is no minimum or...