Do You Have Risk Fees On Your Credit Card Processing Statement?
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.
Because the question underneath this one is bigger. Have you ever had your statement audited to find out whether you have one of the other invented fees? Has anyone verified that your interchange is not being quietly inflated? Most merchants have never done either, and the reason is simple: they assume somebody is regulating this. Nobody is.
What a “Risk Fee” actually is
I could go into a great deal of detail here, and most of it would be lost in industry jargon. That is not an accident either. Ask someone at a processor why a particular amount left your bank account and you will get an answer that runs long enough that you forget what you asked.
So here is the short version. A “Risk Fee” is a charge some processors and ISOs add to a merchant’s account, presented as though it covers the risk of doing business with you. It sounds official. It sits on the statement beside genuine network costs like interchange and assessments, which is exactly why it works.
Here is the part worth sitting with. In all the statements we have reviewed, we have seen exactly one credit card processor and a handful of ISOs charging a fee by this name.
So ask the obvious question. If a Risk Fee were a legitimate, necessary cost of processing payments, why is almost nobody else in the industry charging one?
Real network costs show up on everybody’s statement, because the networks bill everybody. Visa assessments appear on every Visa merchant’s statement in America. A fee that appears on almost nobody’s is not a cost being passed through to you. It is a decision somebody made.
What it costs you, in the only terms that matter
We have seen Risk Fees run as high as almost 1%. That is close to 100 basis points, on top of everything else on the statement.
To understand why that number is so large, you need one benchmark: a well-priced merchant should be paying their processor a margin of around 5 basis points. That is 0.05%, or 0.0005 as a decimal. Five basis points is the whole of what a competitive processor makes on a properly negotiated account.
How is any of this allowed?
Because credit card processing is not a regulated industry. There is no agency auditing processor billing. No law requires a processor to charge you the actual interchange rate. Nothing prevents a processor from inventing a fee, giving it an official sounding name, and placing it on page six of a statement nobody reads.
This is not a fringe opinion. Speaking on the Senate floor on September 27, 2011, Senator Dick Durbin said of the interchange system:
“We also know the current interchange system is unregulated and uncompetitive.”
“The current interchange system, the one that needs to be reformed, is a price-fixing scheme, period!”
Senator Dick Durbin, United States Senate floor, September 27, 2011. The remarks are on the public record and the video is available on YouTube.
That was fifteen years ago. The system he described is the system merchants are still processing on today. There have been class action settlements against processors for overcharging, including the Mercury Payment Systems settlement documented on Top Class Actions. And yet most merchants still hand over unchecked access and never look again.
Which brings up the part that should genuinely alarm you. When you signed your merchant agreement, you gave your processor direct ACH access to your business bank account.
Every month they withdraw what they say you owe. There is no invoice you approve first. Most business owners assume somebody, somewhere, is checking that number. Nobody is.
If you find a Risk Fee on your statement
Do not phone and ask about it. You will get the long answer. Put it in writing instead, and ask three specific questions:
And be honest about the matchup while you do it. You have had this conversation perhaps twice. On the other end is a company with a department that has it every day, and has for decades. That is not a fair fight, which is the entire reason firms like ours exist. We came out of the processing industry, so we know the rules the same way they do.
Risk Fees are one item on a long list
If you do not have one, do not relax. The Risk Fee is simply the most brazen example of a much broader practice: inflated fees charged above actual cost, invented fees with official sounding names, markup buried where it cannot be seen, transactions downgrading into expensive interchange categories because nobody optimized them, and processing fees on refunds that were never credited back to you.
We would rather processors spent their energy making payments safer and cutting fraud. In practice, a remarkable amount of it goes into new and creative ways to hide and inflate fees. If you want to see what the line items on your own statement actually are, our statement decoder walks through them one at a time.
The Processor Scoreboard rates more than two dozen major processors from 0 to 100 on the documented record, sorted worst first, with the evidence behind every point deducted. No processor pays to be listed, and none can pay to be removed. If the company charging you a Risk Fee is on that board, their record is worth five minutes of your time.
Yes, the audit really is free. Here is the catch.
When somebody says free, the reasonable reaction is to ask what the catch is. So let us just tell you.
The catch is the same one the grocery store runs when it hands you a free cookie. They are hoping that once you taste it, you buy the bag. We are hoping that once you see what we find for free, you will want us doing it every month.
To be clear about what that does not involve: no credit card, no commitment, nothing to cancel. Like the cookie, if you do not like it, you are free to keep walking.
And in the interest of being equally transparent about the other side of it: more than 99% of our clients stay with us. Our very first client, from back when we started in 2009, is still with us today.
Frequently asked questions
It is a charge some processors and ISOs add to a merchant account, presented as covering the risk of doing business with that merchant. It is not a card network cost and it does not correspond to any published Visa, Mastercard, Discover or American Express fee. In our experience only one processor and a small number of ISOs charge a fee by this name.
Processing is unregulated, so a processor can charge it if your agreement allows it. The better test is the one you can apply yourself: ask which published network fee it corresponds to, and where in your agreement it is disclosed. Ask in writing, and keep the answer.
We have seen them approach 1%, which is close to 100 basis points. Against a properly negotiated processor margin of around 5 basis points, a single fee at that level takes your true cost to roughly 1.05%, about twenty-one times where it should be.
Often, yes. Fees that cannot be tied to a published network cost or to a clause in your agreement are the most negotiable items on a statement. Put the request in writing rather than making it by phone, so there is a record of what was asked and what was answered.
The absence of one obvious invented fee tells you very little about the rest of the statement. Inflated interchange, buried markup, downgraded transactions and uncredited refund fees are all far more common and far harder to spot. The average overbilling we find is just over 40%.
Send us your most recent processing statement and we will show you exactly what you are paying, what you should be paying, and what we can recover. Free, no obligation, about five minutes of your time.
Or call us at 800-672-1292
General information based on statements we have reviewed, not legal or financial advice. Fee names, amounts and practices vary by processor and by agreement. Senator Durbin’s remarks are from the public Congressional record of September 27, 2011. Current as of August 2026.
Want to talk?
- Call us today 800-672-1292
- Book a free consultation
As seen on
