Your credit card processor hopes you never ask these five questions, from a former executive for the world’s largest credit card processor.

In 2009, U.S. merchants paid $62.1 billion to accept credit and debit cards. In 2025, they paid $198.25 billion, according to Nilson Report figures published by the Merchants Payments Coalition. For most businesses, card acceptance is now the largest operating cost after labor.

You would think the rates themselves must have exploded. They haven’t. When the Government Accountability Office studied interchange in 2009, Mastercard’s highest interchange rate was 3.25%. Today it is 3.30%, five basis points in 17 years. Visa’s top rate was 2.95%. It is now 3.15%, but that increase is recent, and most Visa transactions still clear at 2.95% or less. More people paying by card explains much of the growth in that $198 billion total. It does not explain why so many merchants watch their own effective rate creep up year after year while the networks’ published rates barely move.

That gap is the processor’s markup and the fees stacked on top of it. I know, because I helped collect them. I spent more than a decade in the credit card processing division of a commercial bank, as an executive at Fifth Third Processing Solutions, later Vantiv and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments. During the Great Recession, merchants processed less, so our revenue fell.

Instead of riding it out, the answer was new fees. 95 per merchant ID, the mood was celebration, not regret.

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