Interchange++ vs blended: what your invoice hides.

Every card payment you accept carries three separate costs stacked into one number. Understanding which layer is which — and which one your provider actually controls — is the single highest-leverage piece of payments knowledge a finance team can own.

The three layers of a card fee

Interchange goes to the cardholder's bank — the issuer. It is set by card networks per card type, channel and region: EEA consumer cards are capped low by regulation, while premium, corporate and inter-regional cards cost several times more. Your provider doesn't set it and doesn't keep it.

Scheme fees go to the networks themselves — Visa, Mastercard and local schemes — for carrying the transaction. Also not set by your provider, also passed through.

Provider markup is the only layer your payment provider actually prices. Everything a provider can "discount" or "increase" lives here — which is why serious negotiation always starts by isolating it.

Two ways to be billed for the same thing

With Interchange++, your invoice shows all three layers separately on every transaction: the real interchange, the real scheme fees, and the markup you agreed to. With blended pricing, you see one flat rate — say 2.9% — that averages everything together.

Blended isn't cheaper. It's the same three layers with the receipts removed.

A blended rate has to be set high enough to cover the provider's most expensive scenario. Cheap transactions — local consumer debit, low-risk flows — get billed at the same flat rate, and the difference between the flat rate and their true cost becomes invisible extra margin. When regulation or smarter routing lowers interchange, blended merchants never see the savings.

When blended is genuinely fine

Honesty cuts both ways: for a small business with a simple, homogeneous payment mix, blended is easier to budget and the absolute difference may be tens of euros a month. The crossover comes with scale and mix complexity — cross-border cards, corporate cards, multiple methods and currencies. From roughly mid-six-figure monthly volume, the invisible spread inside a blend typically costs more than the accounting convenience is worth.

How to read your own invoice

• Ask for the full fee waterfall on your top three payment methods: interchange, scheme, markup — separately.
• Check whether refunds, chargebacks, FX and "service" lines appear outside the headline rate, and price them in.
• Compare providers on markup only — interchange and scheme fees will follow you to any provider.
• Reconcile a settlement report against the invoice once. If the numbers don't tie to the cent, that's a data problem you're paying for.

Where Veloqen stands

We default to Interchange++ with a single markup line, pass interchange and scheme fees through at cost, and build reporting so every invoice reconciles against settlement to the cent — the model we always wanted as merchants. The full philosophy is on our pricing page, and if you send us a recent statement, we'll decompose it for you, line by line.