Thank you
In 2020, the card networks announced the most impactful changes to interchange costs in recent memory. Covid delays lead to those cost increases being rolled out over the last 2 years. While estimates of the financial impact captured the news cycle at the time, they’ve largely ceased to be top of mind for merchants. Using the last 2 years of aggregated payments data, we’ll examine the actual impacts on merchants. We’ll identify and quantify the areas where the impacts were most prevalent – card types, industries, etc. Additionally, we’ll explore the longer-term trend in card acceptance costs and how dynamics like the shift of issued card types, new assessment fees, penalty fees, and others have changed the cost of processing over the last 10 years. Finally, we’ll explore the latest technologies and business practices that could help merchants mitigate part of the cost increases, including the interchange savings to be had from network tokenization.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the positive and negative financial impacts, of recent interchange and network fee changes.
- Understand how longer-term trends in card issuance have impacted payments acceptance costs.
- Identify merchant-managed initiatives that could mitigate some of these cost increases.

Description
In 2020, the card networks announced the most impactful changes to interchange costs in recent memory. Covid delays lead to those cost increases being rolled out over the last 2 years. While estimates of the financial impact captured the news cycle at the time, they’ve largely ceased to be top of mind for merchants. Using the last 2 years of aggregated payments data, we’ll examine the actual impacts on merchants. We’ll identify and quantify the areas where the impacts were most prevalent – card types, industries, etc. Additionally, we’ll explore the longer-term trend in card acceptance costs and how dynamics like the shift of issued card types, new assessment fees, penalty fees, and others have changed the cost of processing over the last 10 years. Finally, we’ll explore the latest technologies and business practices that could help merchants mitigate part of the cost increases, including the interchange savings to be had from network tokenization.
Learning Objectives:
- Understand the positive and negative financial impacts, of recent interchange and network fee changes.
- Understand how longer-term trends in card issuance have impacted payments acceptance costs.
- Identify merchant-managed initiatives that could mitigate some of these cost increases.
