How Processing Fees Work
Every card transaction has a cost made up of two components:
Component | What it is | Who sets it |
Interchange | A fee paid to the card-issuing bank on every transaction. Varies by card type: personal cards are cheaper than corporate or premium cards, and domestic cards are cheaper than international ones. | Set by the card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex). No processor can change it. |
Markup | The processing fee charged by the payment platform on top of interchange. | Agreed in the merchant's contract with ValPay. |
The effective rate on any transaction is interchange plus the markup. Because interchange varies by card type, the effective rate will vary between transactions even if the markup is fixed. This is normal and expected.
Daily vs Monthly Billing
Billing method | How it works |
Daily | Processing fees are deducted from each settlement deposit. The net deposit equals the gross minus fees every day. |
Monthly | Fees accrue daily but are collected in a single deduction at the end of each calendar month. Each daily deposit shows the full gross amount. The monthly deduction appears as a separate line on the statement. |
Important for monthly billing merchants: Each deposit row in the portal displays an accrued fee figure alongside the gross deposit amount. This is for transparency so merchants can track what is accumulating — no fees are deducted from individual deposits during the month. The net deposit equals the gross deposit throughout the month. Total accumulated fees are collected once at the end of the month, appearing on the monthly statement and as a single debit from the merchant's bank account.
Processing Fees vs Surcharging
These two terms are frequently confused:
Term | What it means | Who pays |
Processing fee | The fee the merchant pays the payment platform for processing each transaction (interchange + markup). | The merchant, via deduction from settlement or monthly invoice. |
Surcharge | An optional amount added to a customer's bill at the point of payment to pass some or all of card processing costs on to the customer. | The customer, on top of the transaction amount. |
Surcharging does not reduce the processing fees the merchant pays to the platform. Those fees continue to apply regardless of whether surcharging is enabled. Surcharging rules vary by jurisdiction and card type — confirm with ValPay what is permitted for a given merchant's region before enabling it.
Monthly Statements
Monthly statements are generated around the middle of the following month, not on the 1st. This is because the underlying data takes until approximately the 6th of the following month to finalise, and then goes through a reconciliation process before release.
If a merchant runs a monthly invoicing cycle, set the expectation early: statements are typically available around the 15th of the following month. They are accessible in the Statements Manager tab of the portal.
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