Interchange Revenue

Card networks charge merchants (e.g. a coffee shop or an online marketplace) an interchange fee for facilitating the transaction. Most of this fee is then given by the card networks to the card-issuer (Synapse). This is referred to as the Interchange Revenue and can be found in the View Transaction response body of a card transaction under meta.revenues (see: Meta Schema of Card Transactions). The Interchange Revenue is further totaled, split, and disbursed as explained below.

Interchange Revenue Calculation

Interchange revenue is calculated per card transaction. Summing the amount fields from each revenue object within the revenues array (revenues.{}.amount) will provide the total/net interchange revenue for the transaction.

Refer to each example response body below for more details:

Example 1: ATM Transaction

For ATM transactions, the issuer pays revenues to the ATM owner's bank. This results in interchange fees rather than revenues for transactions at ATMs.

So in this case, Interchange revenue amounts (revenues.{}.amount) will always be negative and in the case of switch fees, will have type: switch_fee. Here is an example:

{
  "revenues": [
    {
      "amount": -6,
      "meta": {
        "program": "SWITCH_FEE_TIER_3"
      },
      "type": "switch_fee"
    },
    {
      "amount": –50,
      "meta": {
        "cap": null,
        "fixed_rate": 50,
        "program": "ATM_BASE",
        "variable_rate": null
      },
      "type": "interchange"
    } 
  ]
}

For this transaction the net interchange revenue would be (–$0.50) + (–$0.06) = (–$0.56)

Example 2: Interchange Transaction

For interchange transactions, the issuer gets revenue. So in this case, Interchange revenue amounts (revenues.{}.amount) will be positive. Here is an example:

{
  "revenues": [
    {
      "amount": –3,
      "meta": {
        "program": "PRE-AUTHORIZATION_SWITCH_FEE"
      },
      "type": "switch_fee"
    },
    {
      "amount": 47,
      "meta": {
        "cap": null,
        "daily_adjustment_rate": -6,
        "fixed_rate": 10,
        "program": "MERCHANT_PARTNER_PROGRAM",
        "unadjusted_value": 53,
        "variable_rate": 160
      },
      "type": "interchange"
    }
  ]
}

For this transaction the net interchange revenue would be $0.47 + (-$0.03) = $0.44.

Final Platform Interchange Revenue

Once a month, the interchange revenue amounts (e.g. the $0.44 and -$0.56 figures from the examples above) across all transactions for the previous month are added up (including negative values from fees) to calculate the net interchange revenue generated by your Platform for the month.

Then, the Platform Interchange Revenue is calculated by applying the Interchange Split, a predetermined percentage set in the Platform Master Services Agreement (e.g. 60%), to the total monthly interchange revenue as shown by the formula below:

Once the amount is calculated, we disburse the revenue into your designated interchange revenue account. Your interchange revenue account can be designated on your dashboard (it is typically a DEPOSIT-US account under your master account). To make things easy for your accounting team, we will also attach a revenue summary in the disbursement transaction's JSON under extra.other.attachments. That revenue summary will be the total interchange revenue from Mastercard, without the applied split.