April 2012 Interchange & Assessments

29-Mar-2012 American Express®, Discover®, MasterCard®, and Visa® have announced changes to their Interchange and Assessments that take effect April 1, 2012. Here is a summary of the changes.

American Express

• Cross Border Fee: American Express is adding an International Cross Border Fee of 0.40% on cards issued outside of the United States.

Discover

•  Assessments are increasing .0050%
• Changes to various Interchange Categories: (Shaded cells are lower)

 

MasterCard

• Acquirer License Fee (ALF): MasterCard is adding an ALF of 0.0045% on all processed volume. This equates to $0.45 per $10,000.
• Changes to various Interchange Categories: (Shaded cells are lower)

 

Visa

• Reduction of the NAPF item fee assessment on debit cards by $0.0040. It is going from $0.0195 to $0.0155.
• Transaction Integrity Fee (TIF): This fee will be added to all Debit and Prepaid cards that don’t meet CPS guidelines. This could be caused by not settling in a timely manner, not requesting Address Verification (AVS) on a key entered transaction and/or having a different settlement amount than the authorization (excluding restaurants).
• Introduction of Fixed Acquirer Network Fees (FANF):  The FANF is a new monthly Assessment.  There are two possible fees.     (Click here for FANF Details)
  • Card Present transactions:  The FANF CP will be calculated based on the number of locations for a single Tax ID # and the corresponding fee in FANF Table 1.  This fee will be assessed for each merchant account (MID).  One fee would be assessed for all merchant accounts under the same Tax ID # at the same physical location.
  • Mail/Telephone/ecommerce:  The FANF CNP fee will be calculated based on the total Card Not Present (CNP) volume processed under the same Tax ID #.  Initially this will be billed on the primary merchant account.  Elavon is working on separating this fee in the near future for each merchant account.  If merchants have Card Present and CNP transactions FANF fees will be applied from Table 1 and Table 2 at the corresponding Tier.
• Changes to various Interchange Categories (Shaded cells are lower)

 

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