
What Interchange Fees Actually Are — and Who Ends Up Paying Them
Interchange is the fee a merchant's bank pays the cardholder's bank on every card transaction, and it is set by the networks, not negotiated by the store on the…

Interchange is the fee a merchant's bank pays the cardholder's bank on every card transaction, and it is set by the networks, not negotiated by the store on the…

A chargeback reverses a card sale at the issuer's hand before the merchant hears about it, and the merchant's only recourse is evidence, not argument.

Under 12 CFR 1005.11, a financial institution has 10 business days to investigate a disputed electronic transfer, or must provisionally credit the account and…

Under 12 CFR 1005.11, a financial institution has 10 business days to investigate a disputed electronic transfer, or must provisionally credit the account and…

The Federal Reserve's Regulation II limits what banks with $10 billion or more in assets can charge merchants per debit swipe, and the gap between covered and…

The Credit Card Competition Act of 2026, introduced January 13, would require the largest banks to enable a second credit routing network; it remains in Senate…

The Federal Reserve raised the per-transaction ceiling on its FedNow instant payment rail tenfold, effective January 1, 2026, clearing the way for larger…

The average overdraft fee still runs about 27 dollars per transaction, per Bankrate's checking survey, even after four major banks eliminated the fee entirely.

Card networks now route most card-on-file and mobile transactions through a substitute number called a network token, and issuers say the swap measurably cuts…

Protocols released between May 2025 and March 2026 — Google's AP2, the OpenAI-Stripe ACP, Coinbase's x402 and Stripe's MPP — define how an AI agent could pay…

A chargeback pulls funds back from a merchant's account before any human at the business sees a complaint, and the clock the merchant is racing starts the…

Regulation II has bound large-bank debit interchange to 21 cents plus 5 basis points of transaction value since October 2011, with a fraud-prevention add-on and…

Regulation II limits what large debit card issuers can collect on a swipe to a formula set in 2011 that the Fed proposed lowering in 2023 but has not changed in…

The CFPB's personal financial data rights rule requires the largest banks to open customer data to rival providers on request, with the first deadlines arriving…

The Federal Reserve's instant rail settles in central bank money around the clock, with network limits raised to $10 million effective November 12, 2025.

JPMorgan's July 14, 2026 release set the season's tone: record net income of $21.2 billion with net interest income up 10% and Markets revenue up 35%.

PCI DSS v4.0.1 is the only active version, and its 51 future-dated requirements, from payment-page script integrity to expanded MFA, became mandatory on March…

Banks now run machine-learning models on cash-flow and bureau data to rank credit applicants, while Regulation B adverse-action rules and CFPB circulars require…