ReformingRetail is continuing with a payments statement obfuscation series. We call it SOS for short, and it’s coincidentally a very appropriate acronym. We aim to publish an article in the series twice per month, but it really depends on the shenanigans that we see in the market. Both the statements and analysis are being provided by Merchant Cost Consulting, an advisory group of payments experts that helps merchants lower their processing rates.
These fees all come from February of 2020.
First Data
Starting April 1, 2020, First Data is charging additional per-transaction fees for what they call an authorization reversal. In laymen’s terms, it’s essentially a refund.
Discover Card Brand is increasing their integrity fee to 0.05, which is a fee that is non-negotiable and not set by First Data. HOWEVER, merchants can have this fee waived by batching out or settling their transactions on a daily basis.
Lastly we see a huge markup by American Express, where they’re increasing their network inbound fee to 1% starting April 17, 2020. This is a massive increase and set by the card brand so it’s not negotiable, but it will affect merchants if they accept AMEX cards from outside of US.
Priority Payments
AMEX is network increasing their network fee by 0.01%, which isn’t anything crazy, but it’s still an increase. This network fee is analogous to an assessment fee you’d see with Visa and MasterCard. Priority is also saying that merchant may see changes in tehir qualification fees, which is discount and per transactions costs. We’ll have to watch this more closely.
Heartland
Heartland, as a proxy of Global Payments, started billing merchants for their “customer intelligence suite” which we’re guessing is their repackaged Mastercard data. The customer has to opt out of this fee, not opt in. We can’t even begin to explain how unethical this is. Also, since we have seen the Heartland Analytics tool that repurposes Mastercard data, it’s a turd. Not actionable, no ROI, and just a regurgitated version of Mastercard’s LMI product. Silver lining? At least there’s some product there, unlike the usual “Today ends in y fee”.
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