It’s that time of the year again! As you know every April and October, major credit card brands such as Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and AmEx roll out updates to their interchange fee structures and programs. While it’s essential for merchants to stay informed about these changes, we understand that deciphering these updates can be overwhelming.

To help, we’ve carefully analyzed the latest reports and are here to break down the most important changes that will have the biggest impact on merchants.

VISA

Visa Is Changing the Names of Business cards, Away From Tiers 1-5

Visa is making changes to help track spending on existing and new Business Credit cards in Puerto Rico and the U.S. by adding new indicators (Spend Qualified Indicator values). They’re also updating the names of their Business Credit cards in these regions to match the names used globally.

Updates to U.S. CPS/Automated Fuel Dispenser Fee Program Qualification

Visa will implement changes to allow Visa Fleet Automated Fuel Dispenser (AFD)

transactions up to $1,000.00 to qualify for CPS / Automated Fuel Dispenser. Visa Real TimeClearing merchants are included in this change. The transactions must be processedunder MCC 5542 – Automated Fuel Dispenser (AFD).

Card products must be:

• Visa Purchasing with Fleet – Product ID S1
• Visa GSA Purchasing with Fleet – Product ID S3

The below Interchange programs are impacted by this change:

MASTERCARD

Mastercard is Introducing an Indicator for Multi-Use Virtual Card

Mastercard is adding a new code (Merchant Advice Code value 43) to identify consumer multi-use Virtual Card Numbers (VCNs). This code will show up in response messages to identify VCNs.

Acquirers need to be ready to handle this new code for both approved and declined transactions and pass it on to the merchant.

This will impact SMS Bank Partners with merchants who choose to support, they will need to work with the certification group for coding, testing and implementation

Mastercard’s Approval Probability Indicator

Mastercard is upgrading its Purchase and Recurring Payment Account Status Inquiry (ASI) service. This upgrade allows acquirers and their merchants to include a future transaction amount in their ASI request and get back an Approval Probability Indicator from Mastercard.

The Approval Probability Indicator is a 3-byte single digit number from 1 to 9 that shows how likely it is that a future transaction will be approved. Each number reflects the chance of approval based on a set time period.

MasterCard’s Excessive Authorization fee Is Increasing by $0.20

Starting in October 2022, Mastercard lowered the limit for declined attempts in the Excessive Authorization Attempts program from 20 to 10.”

Mastercard will increase the fee as follows:

INTERLINK

Adding a Commercial Solutions Fee

Interlink previously added a 0.01% assessment on the U.S. POS volume from transactions made using Visa Business Solutions products.

SMS Bank Partners should check their portfolios and make sure the new fee code is added to merchant accounts where it’s needed.

Adding a Digital Commerce Services Fee

On October 1, 2023, Interlink introduced a Digital Commerce Services fee to support digital services that Interlink provides to help improve performance and security of their ecosystem.

With this fee, Interlink also included access to the following services to support CNP transactions, and will no longer bill for these services in the US on a separate billing line for CNP transactions:

• Address Verification Service (AVS)
• Card Verification Value 2 (CVV2)
• Merchant Initiated Transaction (MIT)

NYCE

NYCE Is Raising Ecomm Rates 10-20 bps

As of September 1, 2024, NYCE Network will update the following merchant fees:

Exempt Interchange for Card-Not-Present (CNP) transactions at or above $15 will be

assessed as follows:

Staying informed on major card brand updates is crucial to ensuring your payment processes remain optimized and compliant. If you have any questions or want to understand how these changes may impact your business, feel free to reach out to one of our expert consultants—we’re here to help