Plain-English breakdowns of fees, pricing models, and industry practices so you can make smarter decisions for your business.
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A Different Rail Entirely Pay by Bank Lets a Customer Pay Straight From Their Checking Account Almost every payment a small business takes runs over a card network. Even the ones that do not feel like cards — a tap, a digital wallet, a saved card on file — are still card transactions underneath, carrying […]
Read Article →A New Provision Merchant Buying Groups Could Let Small Businesses Negotiate Interchange Directly For almost twenty years, the price a small business pays to accept a Visa or Mastercard credit card has been effectively non-negotiable. Interchange rates are set by the card networks on published schedules, and an individual coffee shop or dental practice has […]
Read Article →What Changed The Nacha Fraud Monitoring Rules Now Apply to Every Business That Sends ACH For most of the history of the ACH network, fraud-monitoring obligations sat with the banks and the largest payment originators. If your business sent payroll, paid vendors, or collected payments by bank transfer, the rules that governed fraud detection were […]
Read Article →A New Illinois Rule, Sort Of Illinois Says You Should Not Pay Interchange on Tax and Gratuity — but the Start Date Just Moved Again Here is the version an Illinois restaurant owner has probably heard: the card companies can no longer charge interchange fees on the sales tax and the tip portion of a […]
Read Article →A New Surcharging Choice Product-Level Surcharging Is the New Option Most Merchants Will Want Product-level surcharging is a new choice the proposed Visa and Mastercard settlement hands merchants, and it pairs with a second option called brand-level surcharging. For most of the time surcharging has been allowed in the United States, it worked one blunt […]
Read Article →The Terminal You Already Own Your Phone Can Now Be the Card Reader — No Hardware Required For most of the history of card acceptance, taking a payment in person meant owning a piece of hardware: a countertop terminal, a wireless reader, a dongle plugged into a tablet. That assumption is no longer true. With […]
Read Article →A New Line Item, As of April 2026 There Is Now a Fee Every Time Your Terminal Swipes a Chip Card On April 1, 2026, Mastercard introduced a new charge in the United States called the Fallback Avoidance Fee (a/k/a EMV fallback fee). It is assessed on every authorized fallback transaction — meaning every time […]
Read Article →Fees & Interchange Debit Routing Is the Part of Every Debit Transaction Your Processor Controls and You Almost Never See. Every debit card transaction in the United States has at least two possible networks that can carry it. Visa and Mastercard each run a signature debit network. Behind them sit the PIN debit networks — […]
Read Article →Industry Insights Equipment Lease Payment Processing Outlived Diego’s Software by Eighteen Months. The Bill Still Comes. Diego Salazar runs Salazar Auto Care on a side street off Speedway Boulevard in Tucson, Arizona. Three bays, two ASE-certified techs, a waiting room with a coffee pot that actually gets refilled. The kind of independent shop people drive […]
Read Article →Industry Insights The Embedded Payments SaaS Narrative Is Half Right and Half Wrong The current story about embedded payments SaaS and the broader software industry goes like this. AI is eating seat-based pricing. Agents replace seat-licensed users. Consumption pricing replaces flat subscriptions. The traditional SaaS revenue model — pay per user per month, expand seats […]
Read Article →Industry Insights Marguerite Has 41% Premium Card Volume. The Settlement Says She Can Decline It. Should She? Marguerite Devereaux runs a third-generation fine jewelry boutique on King Street in Charleston, South Carolina. The shop is the kind of place where a Saturday afternoon transaction can be a $180 silver bangle for a tourist or a […]
Read Article →A Driveway in Brentwood Casey Spent Four Years Paying for a $4 Cell Plan The wireless terminal fee on Casey Lindgren’s monthly merchant statement read $19.95 — every month, for four years. Casey runs a mobile pet grooming van out of a strip mall in Brentwood, Tennessee. Eight to ten dogs a day, residential driveways, […]
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