When a customer taps their card, your processing fee gets split between three players behind the scenes. Once you understand who takes what, it becomes a lot easier to spot where you might be overpaying.
The three pieces of every fee
Every card transaction includes three separate costs: interchange, assessments, and your processor's markup. Interchange goes to the bank that issued your customer's card, assessments go to the card networks like Visa and Mastercard, and the markup is what your processor keeps for handling the transaction.
Interchange and assessments are non-negotiable. They're set by the networks and every processor pays the exact same rates. The markup, on the other hand, is entirely up to your processor, and it's the part you have the most room to question.
Why your effective rate is what matters
Instead of getting lost in dozens of interchange categories, look at your effective rate: total fees divided by total card volume for the month. That single number tells you what you're really paying, and it's the cleanest way to compare one processor against another.
If your effective rate creeps up month over month without an obvious reason, that's usually a sign of padded markup or downgraded transactions, not the networks raising prices.
How to keep more of each sale
Transparent, pass-through pricing keeps interchange and assessments separate from a flat, visible markup, so you always know exactly what your processor earns. Programs like dual pricing can go a step further and offset most of your processing costs entirely.
The bottom line: you can't change interchange, but you can absolutely change who you process with and how your pricing is structured. That's where the savings live.