The payment processing rates offered vary by country. It rarely goes above 1% in Germany unless you're really not shopping around or are really low volume.

A % of that also goes to the issuing bank*, not to MC/Visa, so I suspect the mentioned 0.2% is talking about what MC/Visa has as their cut.

*: That's also how banks can profitably offer things like cashback.

Depends if we are talking credit or debt cards

The low fees are for debt and high for credit cards and VISA/MC won't allow you to accebt only the debt cards

The fees for those are still often comparatively lower to the US rates posted above. Credit cards are also not popular here, so while I do own one, I suspect average % of a merchant still remains low. Amex also offers pretty good rates to low-volume merchants here to have more acceptance to my understanding.

The rates I posted are the full range. Because it varies yes.

You suspect average percentage is low but try to get a payment processor agreement and see within two years what you actually pay overall. It may get even above the rates I mentioned with fix costs the jeopardy to your business when a fraud does occur and the issuer blocks you from accepting any payment, or worse, accuses you of being the fraudster.

We are well educated by the financial system and VISA/Mastercard to believe this technology is for our own good. Many in the financial industry denounces their predatory practice, that of a cartel of 2 or 3 that imposed a dictate for decades. Things are finally changing, resistance will continue but you will see QR or some alternative will settle in.

This is incorrect.

Visa's processes ~$14T in transactions. At 0.2% thats roughly ~$28B in revenue (VISA posted ~$40B in revenue in 2025) versus 2% is $280B in revenue.

EDIT: The 2~3% you're talking is the payment processor fees which get divvy'd out to acquiring processors, acquiring banks, gateways, merchant processing, etc. etc.

Not in EU.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/fees-for-...

> Specifically, the regulation:

> caps interchange fees at 0.2% of the transaction value for consumer debit cards and at 0.3% for consumer credit cards;

Visa and MC were capped at 0.5% for the network before that change went in as well. But we have no idea what actual rates were beside the cap as they were negotiated with each card issuer based on their risk profile and customer base.

Key term in that sentence is consumer. As in that's not the cap for businesses.

You need to look at both sides of the transaction to figure out the total.

That's the full cap for "consumer cards", so cards owned by "normal people".

There are exceptions for business cards, as said in the document:

> provides for a limited number of exemptions, such as business cards used only for business expenses being charged directly to the account of the company;

These regulations were the reason that American Express pulled out of various European markets (but not all) as it became less/not profitable for them to issue their cards in those markets.

Completely false. They don't apply to 3-party systems.

Not correct. I was there, inside a EEA region bank, as Amex was pulling out due to the fee structure coming online in 2018.

Co-branded Amex cards essentially became considered no different than 4-party cards and stopped being exempted from the cap interchange in 2018. Nothing changed for Amex proper. How would you even define interchange when it's indistinguishable from the scheme fee?

There's a reason every European PSP charges 2-4x higher fees with Amex cards.

The amount going to Visa/MC is 0.1-0.13%. The vast majority of CC interchange fees go to the issuing banks, not Visa/MC.