Regarding your other list of fees. They are just that- a list. So they don’t all add up to + .20%. Credit card rates +0.20% means your rates just went up 20 basis points, in addition to all the new fees you mentioned.

Network access fee of $0.005ea is replaced by acquirer processing fee of $0.195 each. This is a new fee and everyone pays. No way to avoid this one.

Auth/No Settle $0.045ea- this is the Visa Misuse of Authorization Fee explained above, applies if you have transactions that don’t clear. For example if you have a web store and you do an auth only, then capture later, but you don’t have product to ship, so you never capture. That’s a misuse of auth. You can avoid this by voiding transactions as soon as you know you are never going to capture the funds.

Account verify is $0.025ea- it’s unclear what this is for. It might be an address verification fee (AVS), but you’ll have to ask.

Zero floor limit (No Auth) $0.10ea- this is also explained above. I don’t know what system will allow you to capture funds without getting an auth, but apparently it’s possible and this fee will apply when that happens. I expect it will have no impact on most businesses.

Again, if you don’t see the individual fees on your statement, it doesn’t mean you are not paying them. It just means your processor has bundled the fees into a lump line item. In those cases, you’re more likely to see your rates go up much higher on average.

Kehw got a .20% rate increase on top of the new fees. This is not uncommon with bundeled price plans. The processor uses the timing of one rate increase to increase rates overall.

Tom Mahoney

Suppose you approve a transaction on a backordered item, and won’t collect until you ship. Suppose that’s a month later. You just lost 5 cents because you need a new approval code. Or suppose, the freight is less and the approval is a day old, and you don’t want to rip off your customer. You can’t capture on the original approval because it isn’t the correct amount (they charge you more for capturing if the amount approved doesn’t equal the amount captured), and now you can’t get a new approval or you lose 5 cents because you didn’t use the old approval.

They get you coming and going. I’d rather be dealing with loan sharks. They’re more honest.

Answer: I don’t know of a public link to such a bulletin. These fees were sent to merchant service providers via the standard bulletin process in which we receive fraud, rate, regulation and other alert information. I don’t know why they are not posted on the Visa web site. It is apparent through my time in this industry that the associations limit some information that they post online and leave it up to merchant processors to disseminate. The merchant processor has the relationship with the merchant and thus is in a better position to distribute information in a timely manner. Additionally, fees such as listed above may never appear on some merchant statements, because they don’t have a pricing plan that breaks down all their costs. Those merchants have bundled price plans with a higher profit margin for the processor so they can simply absorb fees if they choose to do so.

Is the Visa Misuse of Authorization Fee a PCI Compliance fee? I don’t have inside information to adequately answer this question. My personal opinion is this would be related to tying up someone’s credit, not data security. A properly done authorization will result in an electronic authorization number and no card data storage. The merchant then performs a capture at the appropriate time using the prior authorization number so this would not be a data security issue.