Interchange, scheme fees, acquirer margin: a complete breakdown of the cost of a card payment in Europe and the account-to-account alternatives.
When a customer pays ten euros by card, the merchant does not receive ten euros. Part of it goes to commissions, split between several players invisible to the buyer. Understanding this breakdown is the prerequisite for any decision about your payment acceptance methods.
The first tier is interchange: the share paid to the cardholder's bank. In Europe, it is capped by regulation at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards on domestic and intra-European consumer transactions. This cap applies to neither commercial cards nor cards issued outside the European Economic Area.
The second tier is the scheme fee, collected by Visa or Mastercard themselves. Unlike interchange, it is not capped. It is made up of a mosaic of line items — authorisation, clearing, data services, cross-border fees — whose legibility is poor and whose weight has grown in recent years.
The third tier is the margin of the acquirer or payment service provider, which pays for collection, settlement, handling of unpaid amounts and tooling. It is the only genuinely negotiable line, and the one on which commercial competition plays out.
Added together, these three tiers commonly represent 0.8% to 1.8% for a European retailer, and more in remote sales or with non-European cards. On low average baskets, the fixed component per transaction weighs more heavily than the percentage: a few dozen cents on a coffee change the economics of the point of sale.
On top of this direct cost come rarely quantified indirect costs: terminal rental, the subscription to the card-processing solution, the settlement delay that ties up cash for one to three days, and the chargeback risk in remote sales, where the merchant can be debited several weeks after the sale.
For the buyer, the card is not free either: the cost is built into the displayed prices, since the merchant mechanically passes on their commissions. A cheaper payment system therefore benefits both sides of the counter, even if the effect is diffuse.
The structural alternative is called account-to-account payment. By relying on SEPA Instant, the transaction goes through no card scheme: there is no interchange, no network fee, no acquirer. The payment is irrevocable, which also removes the chargeback risk, and credited in under ten seconds, which removes the cash-flow lag.
This model obviously has its trade-offs: no scheme-specific dispute mechanism, coverage limited to the euro and the SEPA zone, and an acceptance network still being built. For local payments, reimbursements between individuals and freelancers' collections, these trade-offs are generally minor.
The practical conclusion is rarely 'all or nothing'. Keep the card for what it does well — international, remote sales to strangers — and shift to account-to-account everything that can be: local, recurring, known professional. Over a year, the commission gap often represents several thousand euros for a small business.