Every once in a while, I run into someone who openly admits, “I have no idea how merchant processing fees work.” On a daily basis, I speak with plenty of people who are confident they know everything about it.
I was the second kind once. That is the part worth telling, because it explains why we built two quizzes and why almost nobody clears them.
When I first moved from working in the bank to the merchant processing side, I remember thinking, “This has to be the easiest job ever.” My plan was simple. If the competition charges 20 basis points for their discount rate, I will charge just under that, close the deal, and go to lunch.
Wow, was I wrong. Two weeks in, I was already on the phone with my old boss, asking if I could come back. His response? “Your position has been filled.”
Fast forward a decade. I have written a book exposing deceptive billing practices, spoken at events nationwide, done countless interviews, and I am referred to as an industry expert by every major credit association. But let me be as real here as I was in the book. I am not the ultimate expert. I just know more than most.
The truth is that no one can know everything about merchant processing. The industry evolves constantly, and staying up to date takes about 20% of my workweek, every week.
This is not a case of business owners being careless. It is a case of a system that moves faster than any outsider can track, written by the people who profit from your not tracking it.
Sit with that second number for a moment, because the timing is the whole story. This is not a steady drip of small updates you could absorb as they arrive. Twice a year, on schedule, more than 200 rules and rates change at once. Every April and every October, the ground moves under every merchant statement in America.
One has to ask why. If you wanted a system business owners could actually keep up with, you would not build it this way. You would release changes as they happen, one at a time, in plain language, with a note explaining what it means for the bill. Instead you get two enormous drops a year, written in a vocabulary almost nobody outside the industry speaks.
Why else would there be so many changes? A system nobody can follow is a system nobody can question.
Now consider how much time you have to give it. You run a business. Processing is one line item among hundreds, and it arrives in a document specifically built to stop you from reading it closely. That gap is not a personal failing. It is the business model.
For everyone who thinks they have this figured out, here are two ways to find out for certain. One of them you are allowed to cheat on. The other one you are not.
Because you cannot fix or effectively manage something you do not fully understand.
It is like a casual game of football with friends. You do not need to know every rule to have fun. But if there is a million dollars on the line, you would want to know every loophole, every rule, and every strategy to win. There is a difference between playing for fun and playing when the stakes are high.
That is why so many companies trust us. They understand that merchant processing is not a casual game. It is a complex, high-stakes competition where over 200 rules and rates are rewritten every year, every April and every October, by the very teams they are up against.
Here is the part that turns a trivia question into a real number. Credit card processing is a non-regulated industry. No agency audits processor billing. No law requires a processor to charge you the actual interchange rate. Nothing stops a processor from inventing a fee, naming it something official sounding, and putting it on page six.
And you have given that company unrestricted ACH access to your business bank account. Every month, they withdraw what they say you owe. Most business owners assume somebody, somewhere, is checking that number.
Nobody is. That is why what you do and do not know about your statement is worth actual money.
So take the quizzes. If you clear them both, you are genuinely in rare company, and you probably do not need anyone’s help reading your statement. If you do not, you have learned something far more useful than a score.
If the quizzes exposed a few gaps, this is the fastest place to close them. We built a decoder for merchant processing statements that goes line by line through the fees you are actually being charged: what each one is called, what it really is, whether it is a genuine network cost or something your processor invented, and where to find it on your own statement.
It covers dozens of the fee names that show up most often, including the official sounding ones that no card network has ever heard of. There is even a page for the fee that is on your statement but not in the decoder, because processors keep inventing new ones.
Pull up your last statement and read it with the decoder open beside you.
Almost everyone finds at least one line they cannot explain. That line is exactly where your next conversation with your processor should start.
Understanding the fees is half of it. The other half is knowing the track record of the company charging them. Most merchants have never looked, because until recently there was nowhere to look.
The Processor Scoreboard rates more than two dozen major credit card processors from 0 to 100, sorted worst first. Every score is built strictly on the documented record: lawsuits, settlements, complaint files, real fee specimens, and the companies’ own responses. Each profile shows the evidence behind every point deducted, including case numbers and statement specimens.
No processor pays to be listed, and no processor can pay to be removed. Every company rated is invited to respond, and responses are published unedited. Find your processor and see what its record actually says.
Their record is on that board. Your money is on your statement. Between the two, you will know more about merchant processing than most of the people who sell it.
Send us your most recent processing statement. We will tell you exactly what you are paying, what you should be paying, and what we can recover. It is free, and it takes about five minutes of your time.
Or call us at 800-672-1292
Read More Check out our other insights here
If Bank of America handles your credit card processing, go and pull your last three statements before you read any further. We have watched accounts at that bank move from four basis points to over forty, and the businesses paying it were told the new
Do you have a “Risk Fee” on your credit card processing statement?
No? Good. You are luckier than a lot of merchants, and you should keep reading anyway.
