No More Surprises: Stay Ahead of Payment Processing Costs with New Fee Detection

For most payments managers, keeping costs low isn’t just important—it’s a core tenet of the job. The cost of processing payments continues to increase as new fees from processors, card networks, and banks seem to pop up every day. To protect your margins, you must stay on top of rising fee costs and do all you can to avoid them where possible. That being said, when you’re simultaneously juggling multiple processors and evolving your pricing structures while attempting to manage ever-changing industry fees, keeping up is easier said than done.

To help you in this important quest, we’ve just released a new feature in our payments data visualization platform known as New Fee Detection. This simple but powerful feature in our Costs dashboards helps you spot new fees as soon as they appear. Instead of manually combing through reports, you can instantly see what new fees you’ve faced this month and stay ahead of cost changes.

How It Works

We’ve added a toggle to the following dashboards that highlights newly introduced fees: 

• Fees by Category

• Fees by Subcategory

• Interchange & Assessments

This Only New Fees toggle works as you might expect, filtering these dashboards to only display new fees. Fees are flagged as “new” when they’re unique to a MID-network combination; this means the fee hasn’t shown up before on the associated MID, from the associated card network. Given this definition, a fee will still be flagged as “new” even if it has shown up before on a different MID or from a different card network on the same MID.

Flipping this switch means you can immediately identify additional fees on one of your MIDs or from a card network you didn’t expect or plan for. With this one toggle, it’s easier than ever to track such unexpected changes.

This feature is also included in downloadable reports, so even those merchants who analyze fees offline can still identify new costs without extra manual work. When you export your fee data to CSV, you’ll notice a new column title New Fee. Each row then identities as fee as new, or under review; “under review” fees are those we’re in the manual process of reviewing and mapping.

Why This Matters

No payments team wants to be caught off guard by rising costs. New fees can significantly impact profitability and keeping up with them takes time and resources not all payment teams have. Without a clear way to track new incoming fees, businesses may only notice changes once they’ve already started cutting into revenue.

With New Fee Detection, you always have a clear view of what’s new. Only when you know new fees exist can you adjust your operations and processing strategy to avoid or account for them. With Pagos, you have the data visibility you need to stay ahead of changes, act quickly, and make sure your payments strategy remains cost-efficient.

Turn on the Only New Fees toggle and see what’s new—because the best way to manage fees is to never be surprised by them.