How do scheme fees work?
Card networks charge acquirers per transaction and per service: for authorization and clearing, for cross-border payments, for access to programmes such as tokenization, and as penalties for behaviour they want to discourage. Acquirers pass these fees on. Under Interchange++ pricing, which Adyen describes as passing interchange fees through with a fixed markup, scheme fees appear as their own line; under blended pricing they are inside one rate.
Why do scheme fees matter?
They add up, and some of them are within the merchant’s control. Retry penalties are the clearest case. PayPal’s May 2026 summary says Visa charges USD 0.10 per domestic and USD 0.25 per cross-border transaction for retries on Category 1 declines or beyond its cap, and Mastercard charges for soft-decline retries beyond 10 in 24 hours or 35 in 30 days. As an illustrative example: a merchant that retries 2,000 Category 1 Visa declines a month, half of them cross-border, pays about USD 350 a month in avoidable scheme fees, before its provider’s own attempt fees.
Why are scheme fees hard to manage?
They are numerous, they change, and they are often reported in aggregate rather than per transaction, so a merchant on blended pricing may never see them. Reading them needs fee data per transaction from each acquirer, matched to the attempts that caused them.
Where does Omno use it?
Scheme fees are charged through each acquirer or PSP; Omno does not set them. Omno’s routing-decision log shows every attempt per provider with its response code, for reconciliation against fee lines.