The expensive network (scheme) announcements are rarely the ones marked mandatory.
That's the pattern I keep running into, and it takes most issuers and acquirers a while to work out why.
Both networks classify what they publish. Mastercard prints a metadata block on the face of its announcements covering type, category, audience, region, brand, affected system and an action indicator telling you what response is expected. Visa organizes by publication channel and release calendar, and separates mandatory from recommended in its program documentation.
Both are trying to answer the same question. What action does this require, and who should look at it.
Neither does it at a resolution you can use. The audience field says issuer, acquirer, processor, and you are one of those on most of them. It won't tell you whether the announcement touches your BINs, your products, your markets or your processor's release schedule. Which is why most teams still read everything in order to act on a fraction, or nothing given the sheer volume of announcements.
And neither answers the question a CFO asks, which is what it costs and when it hits.
Those are different axes. An announcement can sit high on one and low on the other, and the ones sitting low on action and high on cost are the ones that get through.
Four tiers in the carousel, sorted by where the cost lands rather than what action is required. Some fees hit the next invoice. Some accrue because nobody acted. Some carry no fee at all but consume engineering capacity you had budgeted for something else. And some are a function of how your own portfolio performs against a threshold, so they arrive months after the announcement that set the bar.
The one I'd sit with is the second. Cost that accrues from not acting. Default enrollment in a service, a fee structure that penalizes an unused service, a cheaper option that needs an affirmative election. No deadline is missed and no rule is breached, which is exactly why nothing flags it.
Our network fee reviews typically find 7 to 15% of total network fee spend as potentially reducible, and 3 to 6 points of that is opting out of services clients are billed for and don't use. That's our own methodology, not a published figure.
Test it. Take last quarter's invoice and pick the ten largest line items. For each, can someone name the announcement that introduced or last changed it? Then ask which of the ten you actively chose.
In my experience the first question is answerable for about three of them. The second is harder.
From a briefing I've written with @Rivero on what network compliance actually costs. Download from our website here.