Interchange & Scheme Fees

The Fee endpoints allow for estimations on the interchange and scheme fees that are applicable to a charge. These endpoints give an estimate of the total cost a charge will incur prior to submitting it for authentication, authorization and/or clearing. These endpoints return these fees applicable to the charge in their own format, and both rely on the same minimal set of input parameters to get the most accurate estimation. Therefore, the merchant acceptor, transaction type, and 3DS usage are requested. These endpoints can be used to receive indicative interchange and scheme fees that will be applied to an indicative transaction. This information can then be used to determine merchant pricing for IC++ pricing models.

The estimate may be inaccurate due to any of the following reasons:

The selected interchange program is surfaced in the API response in the designator field which is not scheme agnostic and will return different sub-fields for Visa feeDescriptor and Mastercard ird. More information on the fee programs can be found in the interchange manuals of the respective schemes.

Fee Components and Amount

The API endpoint will return the total interchange fee amount in the amount field and this information should be sufficient for interchange fee estimation. All individual fee components will be returned in a segments structure which contains the elements used in the calculation of the total amount. This could consist of a fixed component as well as a variable component. The variable component might be capped.

It is advised to use the amount field where all of this logic has already been applied. These elements are returned in order to give a complete picture of the interchange fee inner workings and allows for reconstruction of the interchange fee.

Currency Conversion

The fee components are not necessarily in the same currency as the transaction currency but the fee service takes care of this conversion to simplify the usage of this endpoint. The used currency conversion rates are sourced from the card scheme rate tables which are published and updated on a daily basis. The version of the used rate table file is returned in feeDate.

The amount is always in the transaction currency and the conversion rates used are listed in the rates structure containing all necessary elements to reconstruct the conversion operation.

Example Estimate Interchange Request

Example Estimate Interchange Response

Scheme fees are fees that are determined and directly charged by the different card networks. Scheme fees are updated periodically over time. The fees themselves are a combination of transaction related elements, for example 3DS authentication and authorisation fees but also fixed fees such as subscriptions to certain card network services. Scheme fees can be charged on a fixed amount per transaction or as a % of transaction amount and have varying billing periods ranging from weekly, monthly, quarterly to annually. Some scheme fees are applied on a per-transaction level, while others are done at an acquirer level. Certain scheme fees may also be adjusted as card schemes may initially charge fees based on acquirer country but then adjust the fees to reflect merchant country pricing at the end of each quarter.

We provide estimated scheme fees on a per-transaction basis using our proprietary scheme fee pricing model based on hundreds of rules that are triggered by transaction characteristics such as transaction jurisdiction, transaction amount, and authentication performed.

Our scheme fee model is frequently updated based on card scheme bulletins and releases. Our scheme fee reports are designed to support an IC++ pricing model and allow reconciliation with scheme fee billing invoices received.

The Estimate Scheme Fee endpoint will perform a scheme fee estimation, returning a list of predicted scheme fees when passing some parameters similar to a charge. These scheme fees can be either a fixed or basisPoints scheme fee, and contain a calculated amount based on the input amount and the scheme fee amount. See the example request:

Example Scheme Fee Response