Payment costs and performance, from the merchant side of the table

A card transaction carries three separate costs. Interchange, which your acquirer passes to the issuing bank. Scheme fees, charged by Visa and Mastercard for use of the network. And your acquirer's markup, which is the only part that was ever negotiated. Blended pricing hides all three behind a single rate, so the first question is not whether your rate is competitive, it is whether you can see what sits inside it.

Start with what your PSP costs are made of, then what your PSP will not tell you about interchange and why rising scheme fees are eating your margin. If you would rather work from your own invoice than from the theory, that is what cutting your PSP costs involves. And if your contract is already pass-through, the question is no longer what the rate is but whether the amounts reaching your invoice are the amounts the schemes actually charged, which is a reconciliation rather than a negotiation, and is covered under pass-through cost verification.

Coverage is a cost decision before it is a product decision. Every method you add carries its own economics, its own settlement behaviour and its own effect on conversion in the market it belongs to. The index below covers 63 methods across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Each entry sets out what it is, where it matters, and what it means for a merchant rather than for a cardholder.

One thing worth stating plainly, because it is the single most common misunderstanding in this field. You contract with your PSP, never with a scheme. What you pay to accept iDEAL, Bancontact or Visa is a pricing decision somebody made about you, not a published rate you are stuck with.

Coverage decided while the contract is open costs nothing extra to add. Decided afterwards it is a change request with a price on it, which is the argument for settling it inside a payment RFP.

Sixty-three methods, grouped by the market they belong to rather than alphabetically, because coverage is decided per market. The full index sits at payment methods.

The PSP Upside Calculator is a free estimate of what your payment set-up is leaving on the table, across cost and performance together. Reading about interchange is useful. Putting your own volume against it is more useful, and that is all this does.

It asks for your turnover and your monthly PSP invoice, both optional, your business model and channel split, your transaction volume, the markets you sell in, who your provider is and how long you have been with them. Then it asks how that provider actually behaves: whether it brings savings to you unprompted, what it does about performance, and what its market sessions are worth. About two minutes, and nothing is uploaded.

What comes back is a range rather than a quote. It estimates what is recoverable across cost and performance together, because the two are rarely separable. A merchant on a keen headline rate can still be losing more to declines than to margin, and a merchant with a strong authorisation rate can still be paying for a cardmix nobody has revisited since the contract was signed.

The result goes to an email address you give at the end, and you choose whether that is the end of it. One option sends the estimate and nothing follows. The other sends it with an offer to go through it.