Card Network (Scheme) Fee Pass-Through Is Harder Than It Seems for BIN Sponsors, Acquirers, and ISOs

For BIN sponsors, acquirers, and ISOs, card network fees are not always recovered in full from clients - even when clients have dedicated Visa or Mastercard BINs, ICAs, SREs, or other network identifiers.

Why? Because network fee pass-through is structurally complex.

Fee recovery breaks down when:

• Network fee drivers vary by behavior (authorization volume, fraud metrics, cross-border mix)

• Allocations across portfolios are non-linear and difficult to normalize

• Billing and pricing systems cannot reliably map Visa and Mastercard network invoices to client-level pricing models

The result is that universal or program-level network fees, assessed at the sponsor or acquirer level, are not fully passed through downstream. Over time, this creates material basis-point margin leakage.

Fixing the problem starts with visibility and discipline:

• Understanding which network fees are client-driven vs shared

• Designing allocation frameworks that can be operationalized

• Building repeatable processes for consistent network fee recovery across the portfolio

If you’re trying to improve Visa and Mastercard network fee recovery rates from clients, or conduct a network fee optimization exercise, CRG can help design a defensible framework to allocate, recover, and support network fee pass-through at scale.