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
Similar to Price List A, the total fee value in the offer is not true. It consists of three parts, two of which are floating. The merchant only learns this from the notes below the table.
In fact, the values of unregulated interchange fees are often higher.
Footnote [3] further relativises the already vague level of fees; the merchant has no way of even estimating the actual amount.