Every figure has a source and a date
Rates come from published material: the Interchange Fee Regulation's caps, the commitments Visa and Mastercard gave the European Commission for cards issued outside the EEA, the schemes' published fee schedules, payment providers' public price lists, and studies by regulators and merchant associations such as the UK Payment Systems Regulator and EuroCommerce. A guide names its source next to the figure, and the date at the top of the page says when its figures were last checked.
Payment prices move. The card schemes revise their fees on published cycles, and providers change their list prices. A figure without a date is a figure you cannot rely on.
Measured, billed and modelled figures are never added together
Three kinds of figures describe payment costs, and the guides say which one they are using.
- Measured: read from settlement data or a network-cost report that splits each charge into its layers.
- Billed: read from a provider's invoice, classified by fee type.
- Modelled: estimated from the regulated caps, the schemes' published commitments and public price lists, applied to a card mix. This is what you have when a provider discloses nothing.
They describe the same cost from different angles, so adding them double-counts it. A modelled figure is shown as a range, because collapsing honest uncertainty into one number invents a precision nobody has.
Ranges lead with the cautious end
When a figure is a range, the guides use the end that understates the saving. A reference price is set at the top of its published range, so the gap between what you pay and what you could pay comes out smaller rather than larger. If a saving still shows up on cautious assumptions, it is worth raising with your provider.
Examples use published prices, never customer data
No figure in these guides comes from an Oryjin customer's data. Worked examples are built from published prices and stated assumptions, and an illustration is labelled as one.
Figures are checked twice a year
Every page that carries a rate is reviewed in January and July, after the card schemes' usual revision cycles, and whenever a regulator or a scheme announces a change that affects it. The date at the top of a guide changes only when its figures were actually checked.
Reporting an error
If a figure is wrong or out of date, write to contact@oryjin.com with the page and the source you are reading. Corrections are made on the page itself and its date is updated.