Paying Less to Get Paid: Practical Strategies for Reducing the Cost of Card Acceptance

For US merchants, card acceptance costs have become one of the fastest-growing line items of the P&L. Credit card interchange and network fees routinely consume 2–3% of revenue—and nothing about the current environment suggests that’s going to improve on its own. But merchants aren’t powerless. A new generation of cost-reduction strategies is giving merchants—and others in the merchant acquiring value chaing—practical options to reduce what they pay to get paid. This NYPAY panel brings together industry practitioners to unpack three distinct approaches: Compliant Surcharging— How merchants can pass card fees to cardholders while staying fully within card network rules and state law. We’ll cover how precise, managed surcharging programs are working in practice—from SMBs to Fortune 1000 companies—and what compliance really requires. Pay-by-Bank 2.0— The new generation of account-to-account (A2A) payment solutions that bring card-like checkout experiences with bank-transfer economics. Including loyalty-integrated models that let merchants turn lower acceptance costs into customer rewards—without changing how consumers pay. Merchant Buying Groups— How merchants can aggregate payment volume to negotiate better interchange and processing rates—the collective bargaining approach to acceptance economics that’s gaining traction across verticals.