How Issuers Can Reduce Visa and Mastercard Network (Scheme) Fees by Eliminating Optional Services
Visa and Mastercard network fees are rising, and many issuers are feeling growing pressure on margins as 2026 planning begins.
Network fees are distinct from interchange and represent a growing share of card related costs for issuers and acquirers.
What often goes unnoticed is that a meaningful portion of these costs comes not from mandatory fees, but from optional Visa and Mastercard network services that remain enabled long after their original purpose has passed.
In a recent review, CRG identified 75 optional network fee line items that a sophisticated issuer could eliminate or materially reduce:
45 optional Mastercard reports and services
30 optional Visa reports and services
This was not a poorly run institution.
It was a strong, well-governed card program.
The issue was not intent.
It was visibility and ownership across an increasingly complex network fee catalog.
What are “optional” Visa and Mastercard network fees?
Visa and Mastercard offer hundreds of reports, data products, monitoring services, and program add-ons.
Some are:
Explicitly optional
Automatically enabled by default
Activated for a specific use case and never revisited
Over time, these services accumulate quietly on network invoices, often without a clear view of:
Why they were enabled
Who owns them
Whether they still deliver value
This is one of the most consistent sources of network fee leakage across issuer portfolios.
Why even strong issuers overpay network fees
In almost every review, the same structural issues appear:
New optional services are introduced regularly
Many are enabled automatically or bundled with other changes.
Services are activated for a one-time use case
Fraud analysis, product launches, or pilot programs end, but the fees do not.
No single owner tracks enrollment and ROI
Compliance, operations, finance, and product teams each see part of the picture, but no one owns the whole catalog.
As a result, network fees become “background noise” rather than an actively managed cost line.
Why this matters for 2026 P&L planning
Three weeks into 2026, the same themes keep coming up in issuer conversations:
P&L pressure is real
Teams want fast, defensible profitability wins
Nobody wants a six-month transformation to get them
A structured network (scheme) fee optimization exercise is one of the few levers that can deliver measurable savings without:
Customer impact
Product changes
Operational disruption
What a structured network fee review actually looks like
Effective fee reviews focus on:
Full inventory of Visa and Mastercard optional services
Validating ongoing need and usage
Assessing value relative to cost
Identifying services to eliminate, downgrade, or renegotiate
The goal is not to cut indiscriminately, but to ensure every network fee aligns with current strategy and operating reality.
When issuers should review network (scheme) fees
If your institution has not completed a structured network fee review in the last 12 months, there is a high likelihood you are paying for services that no longer match the business.
Network fee catalogs change constantly.
What made sense last year may not make sense today.
The takeaway
Visa and Mastercard network fees are not static, and optional services are one of the most overlooked drivers of issuer cost leakage.
For institutions under margin pressure, bringing discipline and governance to optional network fees is often one of the fastest, lowest-risk ways to improve economics.
If this is relevant to your 2026 P&L planning, CRG is happy to share the savings categories and patterns we consistently see in network fee reviews.