What is Interchange++ pricing, and should your Singapore business be on it?

You close the till after a strong Saturday. The card terminal ran all day and the sales figure on your report looks healthy. A few days later the payout lands in your account and it is smaller than the number you remember.

You know a fee came out. Your merchant statement confirms it, printed as a single percentage against your total card volume. What the statement does not tell you is who took that money, how it was divided, or why it landed on that particular number rather than a lower one.

That gap costs you more than it looks. You cannot tell whether your rate is competitive, because you have nothing to compare it against. You cannot tell which part of it is worth arguing about, because it arrives as one figure. And when a competing provider quotes you something lower, you have no way of knowing whether they are actually cheaper or simply averaging differently.

Interchange++ is the pricing model that closes that gap. Here is what it is, what sits inside it, and how to work out whether your business belongs on it.

The rate is a summary, not a fee

A blended rate tells you what you paid. Interchange++ tells you what you paid for.

Every card payment you have ever accepted carried three separate costs, collected by three separate organisations. That is true on both pricing models. Nobody is inventing new charges and nobody is removing them. The only thing that changes is whether those three costs reach you as three lines or as one average.

This matters because merchants often approach the question as though they are choosing between a cheap model and an expensive one. They are not. They are choosing between a summary and an itemised bill, and the itemised version happens to reveal which parts of the bill anyone can actually do something about.

Follow one payment from the tap to your bank

A customer pays for a treatment at your salon on a Tuesday evening. She taps her card. The terminal beeps. She leaves. Between that beep and the money reaching your account, three organisations each take a cut.

Those three cuts happen on every card sale you have ever taken, on every terminal, with every provider in Singapore. None of that is new. The only question a pricing model answers is whether you get to see them.

The two plus signs are the entire idea

The name is not jargon. Read literally, it is a description of your invoice.

Interchange, plus scheme fee, plus provider fee. Three parts, three lines, no averaging.

Two of the three costs are identical no matter who you sign with

This is the most useful thing on this page, so it is worth reading twice. Interchange is set by the card networks and paid to the bank that issued your customer's card. Scheme fees are set by the networks themselves. Neither is set by your payment provider, and neither can be discounted by one.

Every provider operating in Singapore pays the same published interchange on the same transaction. A large acquirer pays it. A small one pays it. Qashier pays it. The number is the number.

Which means the only place any provider can compete on price is the third component, the processing fee. Under Interchange++ that component sits on your statement with its own line and its own figure. Under a blended rate it is folded into the headline number along with everything else, which is why two blended quotes can look almost identical while the providers behind them keep very different amounts.

What the model changes, and what it leaves alone

Interchange++ is a disclosure model, not a discount. Being clear about the difference saves a lot of disappointment later.

Your rate stops being an average and starts describing your customers

Once the components are visible, your statement turns into information rather than a deduction. You can see that the corporate cards your weekday lunch crowd carries cost more than the local debit cards your weekend crowd taps. You can see what happens to your costs during tourist season. You can see whether that new online channel is priced differently from the counter.

None of that changes what you are charged this month. It changes what you can do about next year. Merchants who can read their own card mix negotiate better, plan pricing more accurately, and know when a quote from another provider is competitive rather than merely well presented.

If it is this useful, why has nobody offered it to you?

Because Interchange++ was built for enterprises, and for a long time nobody bothered building it for anyone else.

Part of that reasoning was real. Passing three costs through on every single transaction means more data to handle, more to reconcile and more questions to answer. Large merchants had finance teams to absorb that, direct relationships with their acquirers, and enough volume to make the effort worth someone's while. A single outlet where the owner does the payroll on a Sunday night had none of those things, so the industry decided the model was not for them and stopped offering it.

The rest of the reasoning has not survived. Processing is automated now, and itemising a statement costs a provider almost nothing to produce. What is left is a habit. A threshold that exists mainly because it has always existed.

Qashier removes the volume requirement. You do not need enterprise scale to ask about Interchange++, and you do not need a finance team to read what comes back. Eligibility still applies and we will be straight with you about it, but the size of your business is no longer the thing that ends the conversation before it starts.

That is not the same as saying every merchant should be on it. Access and fit are two different questions, and the second one is where this gets interesting.

So should your business be on it?

There is no universal answer, and any provider who gives you one without looking at your transactions is guessing. These are the signals that usually point each way.

What to do the next time someone quotes you a rate

Ask which pricing model the quote is on. A blended figure and an Interchange++ figure are not comparable, and comparing them directly is the most common mistake merchants make when switching providers.

Then ask what the provider's own fee is. On Interchange++ they can tell you immediately, because it sits on its own line. On a blended rate the honest answer involves your card mix, and how a provider handles that question tells you a great deal about how they will handle everything else.

Finally, ask what is billed outside the rate entirely. Chargeback handling, refunds, cross-border transactions, currency conversion, terminal rental and compliance charges all sit outside the processing rate on either model. A low headline number attached to a heavy fee schedule regularly costs more than a slightly higher one attached to none.

One rate. Three parts. All of it visible.

Frequently asked questions