With more than 30 years of experience reducing the cost of card acceptance for businesses around the world, Payments Advisory Services is a trusted partner for both lenders and retailers.
Contact us today for a no-cost savings analysis!
CARD ACCEPTANCE COSTS
According to a recent Federal Reserve study: Combined credit card and debit card fees have tripled over the last decade to an estimated $50 billion a year!
Among the major costs to a company or lender accepting credit, debit and prepaid cards is the entire cost of the infrastructure and overhead of payments networks, card issuing banks, processors, funds settlement systems and card fraud losses. On top of this is the costs associated with rewards, loyalty programs and cash-back to the card holder.
The costs of card acceptance fall into three categories:
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Processor fees
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Transaction Interchange
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Card association dues, fees and assessments
Often, initiatives to reduce acceptance costs center around negotiating bank or processor fees, but that is a small percentage of the cost of card acceptance. Transaction interchange is the most difficult area to control, but our extensive knowledge of transaction interchange and of the entire payments landscape enables us to focus on reducing your interchange fees, where lies the greatest opportunity to reduce your costs.
The main focus of Payments Advisory Services is our proprietary Active Interchange Management solution, which monitors and controls the interchange categories into which your transactions qualify . . . . resulting in dramatically reduced interchange cost.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR LENDERS
When your borrowers make their monthly payments with a debit or prepaid card, you may be paying unnecessarily high card acceptance costs. Even if you accept only debit or prepaid cards, you might be able to dramatically reduce those costs.
Talk to us today to find out if this is an opportunity for you to reduce your costs and increase your bottom line.
HELPFUL DEFINITIONS:
CARD ACCEPTANCE COST
The sum of all costs that a company/merchant/lender pays as a result of accepting cards as payment. This cost generally falls into three categories:
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Processor or bank fees which are governed by the contract with your processor
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Card Association (MasterCard, VISA, Discover, American Express, etc.) dues, fees and assessments
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Card association interchange fees
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Usually a per-transaction fee plus a percentage of the transaction amount
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Determined by many factors, including card brand, card-present or card-not-present, swiped or manually entered, debit or credit, CVV entry, AVS entry, loyalty programs, consumer card or business card, etc.
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In most cases, the largest portion of your cost is interchange fees. Therefore, reducing your interchange costs holds the greatest opportunity for overall cost reduction.
EFFECTIVE RATE
The Effective Rate is determined by dividing the Card Acceptance Cost for a specific period of time by the total card sales for the same time period.
CURRENT COST AUDIT
In the Current Cost Audit, we will perform a comprehensive evaluation of the costs you incur to accept credit and debit cards for all brands at all of your locations/environments. We will compare these costs against your processor contracts to find any variances. We will highlight processor discretionary fees and other fees that we consider to be illegitimate. We’ll provide you with a written report of our findings and present them to you along with additional areas to address in order to reduce your costs, improve service and enhance support from your incumbent or prospective vendors.
What does a Current Cost Audit cost?
Our fee varies based on the scope of work we define before any work begins. Costs are set forth in one of two ways:
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Per hour billing
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A flat fee based on the detailed scope of work
What other costs will I incur?
There should be no capital expenditures on your part for the Current Cost Audit.