How to reduce your interchange fees.
Interchange fees are just one component of your overall processing fee total.
Most processors will treat interchange fees as a pass-through. Sometimes they mark it up, but they will almost always claim that they cannot affect the base interchange fee itself, as that is set by the card brands (Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, and Discover).
In a way, they are correct: few processors are equipped to optimize the merchant account in a way that achieves lower interchange fees. But there are factors that can be adjusted for a significant reduction in cost:
- Account Setup
- Debit Optimization
- Business Credit Card Optimization
Optimizing these factors is possible, but it can require extensive expertise and project time.
Verisave has a team of experts to manage interchange on your behalf.
We understand interchange fees, and have years of experience in optimizing accounts and achieving the lowest possible processing costs for our clients.
Merchant account setup expertise.
Credit card processing fees are complex ON PURPOSE. The industry is made up of numerous banks, card-brands, and processors … and all of them influence the fees businesses pay.
To lower these fees, you need extensive expertise, insider knowledge, and mountains of industry benchmark data.
Debit Card Optimization
Typically, debit cards are much much less expensive to process than credit cards.
In part, this is due to the fact that debit cards are less prone to fraud.
And for those who are processing a moderate amount of debit transactions, there isn’t much management needed.
But there are still processing costs involved, and for extremely high volume debit merchants, they can be a concern.
One factor that also affects this is low processing cost: with small transactions (under $5 typically) they are actually much more expensive to process, due in part to the $0.22 transaction fee on Regulated Debit.
Many Verisave clients process an extremely high volume of debit transactions, and have seen significant overcharging due to improper debit processing setup.
Business credit card processing.
Credit cards are usually more expensive to process than debit cards, and business credit cards are the most expensive type of credit card to process.
Example:
- $100 transaction, a regulated debit card costs $.32 in Interchange Fees
- Consumer credit card: $2
- Business credit card: $2.80
There are five tiers, so the above numbers are just one example, with the highest Interchange Rates at 3.15%.
The rate tables involed in business credit cards are much more complicated, and involve more fraud mitigation costs. Navigating these rate rules can be tricky.
You never really know if it’s a consumer card or a business card. So you would often need some kind of technology to identify the card type.
Depending on the processor, you may need to provide different types of data to maintain optimized rates without interrupting the transaction, and thus it’s important to have a way to know whether the card is a business or personal credit card.
Verisave can help.
How we reduce your credit card processing fees:
Verisave offers cost-reduction, simplified. With minimal time investment, disruption, risk, or upfront fees, we can easily bring 10%-30% of your credit card processing fees back to your bottom line.
No need to change processors, and no need to add a project to your team’s workload.
Strategy
We dissect and analyze every fee on your merchant account to find all viable savings tactics, re-classifications, and hidden discounts.
Optimization
We apply these tactics to your existing merchant account, implementing all savings for you. We do all of the work.
Monitoring
We monitor the account every month to ensure your fees do not increase over time, and that any annual rate updates are minimized or avoided.