Besides the fees every issuer pays to use the network, Visa and Mastercard sell services an issuer can choose to take. Many of them are useful. Some keep being billed long after anyone uses them. This guide shows how to find them, and how to stop the ones you no longer need.
What counts as optional
An optional service is one your organization enrolled in, rather than a fee every issuer pays. On an invoice they usually appear as subscriptions or as fees per use, for:
- reports and data files, often billed per report or per line
- fraud scoring and risk tools
- account updating for cards stored at merchants
- tokens and digital wallets
- authentication for online payments
- test environments, certification and consulting
Some of these you need, and some are required for certain products or regions. The aim is not to cancel everything. It is to know what you pay for, and why.
Why they keep billing
- They were switched on at launch, in the program setup, and nobody revisited the choice.
- They are enrolled per BIN or ICA, so they stay on ranges that no longer carry cards.
- They bill a monthly fee whether anyone uses them or not.
- The person who ordered them has moved on, and the line on the invoice has no owner.
- Your processor started providing the same thing, and the scheme's version was never canceled.
- The invoice names them by a billing code, not by the product name your team would recognize.
How to find them
- Take several months of billing detail and list every line that recurs at a similar amount, whatever your volumes. These are your fixed and subscription fees.
- Name each one: the service, the product it belongs to and the BIN or ICA it is billed on. The scheme's pricing guide and your account manager can explain codes you do not recognize.
- Find who in your team would use it, in fraud, operations, finance or product. Ask whether they still use it, and when they last did.
- Check for overlap with tools your processor or other vendors already provide.
- Decide for each one: keep it, cancel it, or move it to a cheaper tier.
A common case: a report subscription that is paid for every month and no longer read.
How to stop a service safely
Before you cancel anything, check these points.
- Whether the scheme's rules require the service for your products or region. Strong authentication for online payments, for example, is required in many markets.
- Whether anything depends on it: authorization rules that use a score, a report that feeds another team's process, a token flow for wallets.
- The notice period and any minimum term in the enrollment.
Then ask your account manager at the scheme to cancel the service, or use the service's own enrollment process. Ask for the date billing stops, in writing.
Watch the next invoices. The line should stop on that date. If it keeps billing, raise it with the scheme and ask for a credit back to the cancellation date.
Keep it from coming back
Give every optional service an owner in your team, and check the list against your invoices once a year. When you launch a new program, write down which services it was enrolled in and why. That record makes the next check short.
If you would rather have this done for you, that is what our scheme fee review does: your Visa and Mastercard invoices, one scheme or both, over the period you choose, read line by line, with the action that removes each fee you do not need.
This guide is general information, based on how scheme billing commonly works, and it is not advice for your situation. Your agreements with the schemes, their rules and their pricing guides take precedence.