The 30-Minute Network (Scheme) Fee Review: A Practical Routine for Issuers and Acquirers

If you only have 30 minutes a month to review your network (scheme) fee invoice…

don’t audit it.

Auditing means getting lost in line items.

With 30 minutes, you need one thing: signal.

Use one filter question:

What changed, and is it controllable?

This is the 30-minute review we built into how we think about it at CardTraq.

I wrote up the basics here (what network fees are and why they move): https://www.cardtraq.com/network-fee-explainer

Here’s a practical 30-minute routine that works for issuers and acquirers.

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Minute 0–5: Start with variance, not detail

Compare this month vs last month.

Flag anything that moved more than 5–10%, or is new.

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Minute 5–15: Sort changes into three buckets

Bucket 1: Expected (volume or mix)

Bucket 2: Controllable (optional services, best-practice gaps, avoidable penalties)

Bucket 3: Abnormal (errors, one-offs, anything unclear)

If you can’t bucket a change, it’s the priority.

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Minute 15–25: Run three high-leverage checks

Check 1: Optional services you didn’t explicitly renew

Check 2: Penalties that indicate a process breakdown

Check 3: Charges that showed up last month and are still here

If something repeats two cycles in a row, it’s not an exception anymore.

It needs an owner.

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Minute 25–30: Write the one-sentence story

Example:

“This month was up 8%: 5% volume and mix, 2% optional services, 1% abnormal items under review.”

This works because it starts with variance, not volume.

If you can’t explain the movement cleanly, control always comes later.

Question:

Can your team explain last month’s network fee movement in one sentence today?