September 21st, 2019

OCTOBER INTERCHANGE 2019 ANNOUNCEMENT
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Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover associations periodically review and modify their interchange rate structures and billing strategies. Specific association modifications are beyond the control of independent processors and will affect all merchant card processors and their customers. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover card associations have announced changes to their programs and rates effective October 2019.

Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover are making several changes to interchange programs and rates effective for October 2019. Details of these changes will be available at a later date.

Visa is updating their Global Private Label Specialized Fee Program.

MasterCard is updating their Consumer and Commercial Product Codes for interregional and intraregional Refunds/Returns.

MasterCard is updating certain interchange rates.

MasterCard will be life cycling certain interchange categories from qualifying under IRD 62 and IRD 67 in the US Region.

MasterCard is making changes to the following programs:

• Effective in October 2019, a name change for the current Processing Integrity Fee programs. The new program name is to promote correct and positive processing behavior. The new program will be called Transaction Processing Excellence.
• Effective in October 2019, the introduction of a new Excessive Authorization fee. This fee will be charged when a single account number exceeds 20 failed authorization attempts from the same card acceptor within a 24 hour period. This new Excessive Authorization fee will be billed out at a rate of $0.10 per authorization starting with the 21st decline within a 24 hour period.
• Effective in October 2019, the introduction of a new compliance fee. This fee matches clearing messages with data from the corresponding authorization messages and compares and verifies the data for accuracy and consistency. This fee will be billed at a rate of $0.15 per instance.
• Originally disclosed in November of 2018, MasterCard is expanding the Safety Net network monitoring solution to include acquirers. Safety Net is a service with the ability to identify a widespread fraud event, and then notify acquirers to take action to prevent further fraud. A $0.0007 fee will be charged, beginning in October 2019, to each MasterCard transaction.
• Effective in January 2020, MasterCard is introducing a new TPE program for nominal amount authorizations. Program fees will be assessed if specific thresholds or processing behaviors are breached in the authorization. Nominal amount authorization occurs when CNP transactions that are less than or equal to 1 USD are authorized and subsequently reversed in effort to validate card status. These types of transactions should include the Account Status Inquiry Service (ASIS) transaction type for account status checks, at the time of the authorization, in order to avoid the TPE Nominal Amount Authorization Fee. For example, when a transaction is ran for a dollar or less, and reversed, to verify an account status, but does not send the Account Status Inquiry Service (ASIS) transaction type in the authorization, a nominal fee would be applied.

The following MCCs are being updated:

STAR is increasing the Merchant Location Participation Fee assessed annually from their current $12.00 Fee to $16.00.

I In order to meet the required 30 day notification of increases and changes to merchants, the following statement message will appear on all August statements for some processors delivering to merchants early September.

Effective October 2019: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover Card Services are introducing new (and modifying current) interchange structures and association processing program fees. Details surrounding these changes will be addressed on your September 2019 Merchant Statement.

The Following will be included on active PIN debit merchant statements: Several PIN Debit Networks charge annual participation fees to access their processing networks. Effective in 2019, the ACCEL Network annual fee is $12.00, the PULSE Network annual fee is $12.00, the NYCE Network annual fee is $14.00, and recently announced, the STAR Network will increase its current fee from $12.00 to $16.00. Annual billing of these fees will occur as follows: the ACCEL Network fee will be billed annually starting in October 2019, the PULSE Network fee will be billed annually starting in April 2020, the NYCE Network fee will be billed annually starting in August 2020, and the STAR Network fee will be billed annually starting in October 2019. These annual fees will be collected from your merchant account for access to these PIN Debit Networks.

Information is also by TSYS