If your customers are other businesses, you're almost certainly paying too much every time one of them pays with a corporate or purchasing card.
Not because you did anything wrong. It's because of a fee called interchange — and most business owners have never been shown how it actually works, or how much of it they can control.
Here's the short version, in plain English. No jargon, no lecture.
The one idea that saves B2B businesses money
Every card payment carries a wholesale fee set by Visa and Mastercard. It's called interchange, and it's the biggest piece of what you pay to accept cards.
You can't negotiate the fee itself. But here's the part almost nobody tells you: the card networks charge you a lower rate when you send them more detail about the sale.
That's the whole secret. More detail in, lower fee out.
Send just the basics (card number, amount, date), and you pay the highest business-card rate.
Send the sales tax and an invoice number, and the rate drops.
Send full line-item detail — what was bought, quantity, price, shipping — and you hit the lowest rate available.
The industry calls these three tiers Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. You don't need to memorize the names. Just remember: the more complete the data, the less you pay. (If you want the fuller walkthrough, see our guide to Level 3 processing.)
Why this matters so much for B2B
Business credit cards — corporate cards, purchasing cards, government cards — are the most expensive cards to accept. They carry the highest interchange rates of any card type.
So if a big chunk of your customers pay with business cards, and you're only sending the basics, you're paying top dollar on your most expensive transactions.
On a $10,000 invoice, the gap between the highest rate and the lowest can be more than a full percentage point — over $100 on a single sale. Now multiply that across every B2B payment you take in a year.
That's the money sitting on the table.
The 2026 change most owners haven't heard about
Here's why this is worth your attention right now.
At the start of 2026, Visa changed the rules. It retired its old Level 2 discount and replaced the whole system with a new program (its official name is CEDP, but that's not something you need to worry about).
Two things you do need to know:
Sending partial data no longer gets you a Visa discount
With Visa business cards today, it's all or nothing — you need the full line-item detail to earn any savings. Half-measures now get you nothing.
The data has to be real
Visa now uses automated systems to check the information you send. Placeholder junk — a fake tax number, a vague "product" description — gets rejected, and the transaction quietly bumps up to a higher rate.
The result? A lot of businesses that thought they were getting a discount stopped getting one in early 2026 and never noticed. Their processor kept sending the same half-complete data, Visa stopped rewarding it, and their costs crept up.
(Mastercard still works the older way — send good data, pay less. So the "more detail, lower fee" rule is very much alive. Visa just raised the bar for what counts.)
The takeaway: this strategy didn't go away. It got stricter. Getting the data right matters more than it ever has — and getting it wrong now costs you.
"So do I have to type all that in myself?"
This is the question every business owner asks next — and it's a fair one. Full line-item detail sounds like a data-entry nightmare: product codes, quantities, tax, shipping, invoice numbers, on every single sale.
If you had to enter all that by hand, the hassle would wipe out the savings. That's exactly why most businesses never bother.
And that's the problem Scale Payments solves for you.
The Scale Payments B2B Advantage
Our payment gateway comes with built-in Level 2 and Level 3 optimization — we call it the B2B Advantage — and it's designed so the savings happen automatically, without adding work to your day. Here's how it works behind the scenes:
It knows a business card when it sees one
The moment a corporate or purchasing card runs, our gateway recognizes it and flags the transaction to capture the lower rate.
It fills in the detailed data for you
Instead of asking you to type line-item info on every sale, the gateway auto-populates the fields — using saved templates for the parts that stay the same and dynamic fields for the parts that change, like an invoice or PO number.
It only does the work when it pays off
If a card can't qualify for a better rate, the gateway doesn't waste effort — you're never charged for optimization on a sale that couldn't benefit.
It stays compliant with the new 2026 rules
Because Visa now audits the data, clean and accurate submission is everything. Our gateway is built to send data the way Visa's new system expects, so your transactions keep qualifying.
The end result: you keep running sales the way you always have, and the lower rates show up on their own. No manual entry, no memorizing card-network rules, no watching your costs slip because a rule changed.
How to find out if you're overpaying
You don't have to guess. Three quick checks:
Do a lot of your customers pay with business or corporate cards?
If yes, and no one has ever set up Level 3 processing for you, you're very likely overpaying.
Are you on a "flat rate" or "tiered" plan?
Those plans bundle everything into one number and quietly keep any interchange savings for the processor — you never see them. The B2B savings only reach you on interchange-plus pricing, where the discount is passed straight through.
Pull your last processing statement
If you can't tell whether your business-card sales are getting the best rate, that's a sign worth a second look.
The bottom line
Cutting your B2B card costs isn't about switching what you sell or haggling over fees. It comes down to two things:
Pricing that actually passes the savings to you (interchange-plus, not flat-rate).
A gateway that captures the detailed data automatically — so you qualify for the lowest rates without lifting a finger.
Scale Payments gives you both, in one setup.
Want to know if you're overpaying? Send us a recent processing statement. We'll review it line by line, show you exactly where your business-card sales are costing more than they should, and tell you what you'd save with the B2B Advantage. No pressure, no jargon — just the numbers.
Scale Payments is an independent merchant services provider specializing in transparent interchange-plus pricing, automated Level 3 optimization, and B2B payment solutions. Card network programs change every April and October; details here reflect the landscape as of mid-2026.