Price List A

The MIF++ offers a merchant receives from payment gateway and terminal providers often contain various catches. These often make it impossible to calculate in advance what the actual transaction fees will be. The merchant will only know this from the transaction statement. We will use an anonymised example of an offer to illustrate its biggest problems.

The biggest problems:

1. The total fee is presented as the sum of the columns marked Interchange Fee, VISA and MasterCard Fee and Other Fees. However, two of these three values are indicative only. This is only mentioned in the tiny notes that explain each column of the offer:
   
2. The interchange fee is regulated only for consumer debit and credit cards, and indeed at 0.20% and 0.30% respectively. For other types of cards, the price list indicates a value of 1,60 % or 1,65 %. However, according to the Visa and Mastercard Interchange Fees tables, these fees can go up to between 1,85 % and 2,10 %. For example, for Czech Mastercard business cards, 1.90% is common.
3. In the column with Visa and Mastercard fees, i.e. scheme fees, again only indicative values are given. In the case of Visa, however, the absolute minimum fee is 0.1166% + 0.0082 EUR (0.20 CZK), i.e. higher than the 0.10%. In the case of Mastercard, the theoretical lowest fee is 0.1915% + 0.0075 euros (0.19 CZK), but e-commerce payments can only really get to that level in theory (when paying up to 5 euros).

Billing

We have demonstrated that the actual amount of fees charged in the MIF++ mode is only known to the merchant through the billing. The following excerpt is from a bill from the same provider but from a different client. It is therefore not based on the above offer.

From one line of this statement, we take the total amount of one transaction and the breakdown of the individual parts of the charges. 

• The interchange fee (IF) in this case is regulated, corresponding to a list value of 0.20% (1.37 : 686.6 x 100). 
• The processing fee is denoted as OP and consists of a percentage (% OP) and a fixed (tr. OP) part: 0,86% + 1 CZK (namely (5,9 : 686,6 x 100) + 1). 
• The abbreviation KA stands for the card association fee, i.e. the scheme fee. In this case, it is 0.28% (1.9 : 686.6 x 100). 
• A simple sum then gives the total fee for this transaction: 1.34% + CZK 1. 

For this statement, it is therefore sufficient to similarly calculate a few lines and compare the result with the price offer. In particular, the card association fee is usually actually higher than indicated by the quotation.