Level 3 Payment Processing and Why you should consider including level 3 line item detail on credit cards you accept from other business or government?
The short answer is, not doing so, you pay about 1% more than you should on every credit card you accept.
To understand why level 3 credit card processing is so important you have to have a general understanding of rates and interchange.
Banks issue credit cards because they earn “interchange” revenue on purchases made on their issued cards. Interchange amounts to roughly 75% of a businesses total expense for accepting credit cards.
There are over 400 different interchange rates that vary depending on: The type of card, method its processed, SIC code, size of the ticket, industry and other factors.
Commercial, B2B and government cards are different than other credit cards. Aside from the additional functions and features these cards have.
Special interchange rates were created more than 10 years ago and were intended to be an incentive for government vendors pass Level 3 information which in turn helped government agencies manage spending on government issued credit cards.
Now, its not only government cards that are eligible for these reduced interchange rates, but commercial, corp, fleet, business and purchase cards that qualify.
Statistics show us that most business have not been set up to accept these cards properly.
In fact as many as 3 out of 5 businesses are still not accepting commercial and government cards correctly.
Commercial, B2B, Purchase and government cards have 3 different interchange rates. Transactions processed without level 3 detail qualify at different interchange codes and cost .85%-1.5% more before processors even add their markup.
To see this for yourself Google Visa interchange rates.
Visa’s website page 11
You can see the interchange cost of accepting a commercial card with vs w/o level 3. This happens before your processor adds their markup.
• Commercial Level III 1.85% + $0.10
• Commercial Level II 2.05% + $0.10
• Commercial Card Present 2.50% + $0.10
• Commercial Card Not Present 2.65% + $0.10
Revolution Payments developed technology to help businesses meet the requirements resulting in qualifying for MasterCard and Visa Level 3 interchange rates without having to manually enter the 7-13 additional fields otherwise required.
On average, this lowers the cost of accepting B2B & B2G credit card transactions on average by 1.0% to 1.5%., with companies seeing as high as $3,000-$11,000 per month in savings.
Merchants could try to manually add the necessary Level 3 processing details to receive level 3 interchange rates, but it’s pretty complex, with over 400 different interchange rates based on industry, method of card acceptance, type of card used, and size of purchase.
The Revolution Payments’ Gateway automates the Level 3 updating of credit card payments – making the complex incredibly simple.
Revolution Payments is a is a full-service payment provider of electronic transaction processing services for
(B2B) business-to-business and (B2G) business-to-government
merchants with over 20 years’ experience
Questions? Give us a call at 888 790 3450. Get your free rate quote today.