Marci Gagnon, VP of Strategic Alliances, and Jonathan Gilbert, Director of Business Development at Qualpay, break down recent credit card fee changes. They discuss what the swipe fee settlement actually impacts, the growing cost pressures tied to commercial cards, and what marketers can do now to protect margins and optimize payment data.
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Brian Cohen: Welcome to ADDcast. I’m ADD Systems Multimedia Specialist, Brian Cohen. Today, we’re talking about the 2026 Business Tech Conference, ADD Systems’ premier user conference, which takes place May 18th through the 22nd, 2026 at Disney’s Yacht and Beach Club in Orlando, Florida. Joining me today are Marci Gagnon, VP – Strategic Alliances, and Jonathan Gilbert, Director of Business Development at Qualpay, who’s a Platinum Sponsor of the 2026 BTC. Marci and Jon, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
Jonathan Gilbert: Thank you for having us.
Marci Gagnon: Yeah, thanks for having us. It’s always fun to chat with y’all.
Brian: Likewise. Could you start by maybe reminding listeners a little bit about Qualpay and what you offer ADD Systems customers?
Jon: Absolutely. So Qualpay is a payment processing platform that helps businesses accept and manage payments more efficiently. So we’re an integrated platform, which means that we allow businesses to accept ACH payments, credit card payments through a variety of different channels. So we’re providing the merchant account, the payment gateway, plus some next-generation payment tools to help streamline your operations and to get a better view of all of your data. So we help with the online payments, recurring payments, and we help integrate into all of the software that fuel and energy and propane marketers use for their business. So we help unite all of the data together and bring an integrated solution to help manage your business much easier, and we also combine that with just next level of customer support and account management.
Brian: Excellent. Now moving into our topic of discussion today, Marci, we’ve all seen the headlines about the swipe fee settlement and lower credit card fees, which sounds like a big win, but what does this actually mean for fuel marketers day to day?
Marci: Yeah, you know, this is a really great place to start. On paper, the swipe settlement, it sounds like a really good deal. We get lower fees on some consumer cards, more control over accepting the different types of cards that businesses want to accept, being able to avoid some of those higher cost cards, and all of it is sort of adding up to billions in potential savings for businesses. But when you really break it down, day to day, the reality for a fuel marketer is that it’s actually pretty modest. The settlement focuses mainly on standard consumer cards, and what that really means for the headlines is that commercial and purchasing cards weren’t meaningfully impacted at all, and that’s going to matter, and it’s going to matter to marketers, because those are some of the highest cost and fastest growing transactions in the industry. So when you combine this with the earlier announcement that the way you’re going to qualify for rates on commercial cards has changed, actually, starting in January of this year, and a full pricing category is being removed altogether in April, this is more of the part that’s going to matter, because any savings that folks are going to get from the settlement are going to get eaten up pretty quickly or even reversed if you’re not prepared for the other changes on the commercial side that are happening in 2026. So that’s really the bigger story here.
Brian: So, Jon, looking at the big picture, energy marketers may not even see savings from this settlement if they have a lot of commercial customers. So are there bigger opportunities they should maybe be paying attention to?
Jon: Yeah, absolutely. And Marci had talked about this a little bit earlier, but you know, if you have commercial customers, you’re not really insulated from some of the largest costs and accepting those types of payments. And what I mean by commercial customers is, you know, if you’re delivering to a residence, that person’s credit card may say Jonathan Gilbert on there, but if they’re delivering to a business, that card says Acme Auto or ABC School or whatnot. And because that card is different, and because there’s a little bit more associated risk, the card brands are looking for a little bit more data in that transaction. It’s called level-two and level-three data. And if you’re not adding that data to the transaction, this settlement really doesn’t matter at all, because instead of saving these nickels and dimes that you would have, you’re actually leaving a lot of money on the table. If you’re not set up properly, you could be losing $20 to $30 per delivery.
Brian: Okay, so you mentioned level-two and level-three data. Can you break that down in layman’s terms, for those who might not know what the reference is?
Jon: Yeah, sure. So a lot of energy marketers, they know about utility rates, and that there was a certain setup that you had to do 10 years ago in order to get the best rates for Mastercard, Discover, and American Express, and then you needed the services rates for Visa. And so, this was essentially a setup. This was a way of setting up a merchant or a marketer. Now, what these commercial cards need in order to qualify for the lowest rate is enhanced data with the transaction. So before, you used to need a customer code, an invoice number, a merchant ID number, tax ID number, and sales amount number. And if you added this info into a transaction, you would get reduced rates by, you know, up to 100 to 75 basis points per transaction, which, that is a lot of money. That could be $20 to $30 on a $1,000 transaction. So the card brands are asking for a little bit more data now. And so while there were providers who could provide the level-two data, now there’s a whole other can of worms that the card brands are looking for. So they’re now looking for your duty amount, your product code, your postal code. They want a fleet card indicator, invoice amount, and item text amount. It’s just a whole other subset of data that you need in order to pass this transaction. And for the card brands to see that information on the settled transaction data, they will give you those rates, the level-two and level-three commercial card preferred rates. If you do not provide all of this data with the transaction, you’re going to get what’s called a downgraded or default rate, which, you know, if any marketers knew what it was like accepting payments before utility rates came out, this is a very similar thing, where you’re not getting the best rate. It’s like walking into a Sam’s Club or a Costco, and you’re not having a membership card and having to pay, like, a completely different price for every single item that you purchased.
Brian: So then how does that actually affect what they’re paying, and where do you typically see marketers miss the mark?
Jon: So you see this in the interchange fees, which can be confusing for many marketers, because a lot of, what marketers are quoted for credit card processing, generally, they’re quoted by the payment processor. The interchange fee has a pass-through cost, so they’ll say, we’re going to charge you 50-basis points over interchange. And the 50-basis points goes to the processor, and then everything else goes to the card brands. And so while marketers think that, hey, I’m getting a better deal because my processor may have lowered my cost from 50-basis points to 40-basis points, if you actually looked at your statement, the very top part is that processor markup that you’re paying, and that’s what keeps the lights on for the payment processor and so forth. But many marketers think that the interchange fees, the fees that make up 70 to 80% of your cost on your statement, 70 to 80%: these are the fees that are going directly to the card brands. This is where those fees show up. And so, if a marketer is just thinking that this type of cost is the same for every processor, it isn’t. So what I’m saying is that whole 80% of your statement, those fees can be looked at and actually changed, and the level-two and level-three rates are in there. So what you might see is on your statement is an indicator that says level-two. So you might see Visa Commercial, level two or level three, or so on, so forth on these cards. But a lot of times when you’re looking at these statements, you don’t really know where this information correlates. And so that’s where we can help you out by putting your statements through our system and essentially just showing you where you’re optimized and where you’re not. And so when you’re talking about the 70 to 80% of your fees, we can reduce those quite a bit, and that can have the biggest effect to your bottom line.
Brian: Well, that’s interesting. Now, Marci, I’d like to bring you back to the conversation. Over the years, I’ve heard you talk about optimizing data, and there’s been a shift from just passing data to actually validating it. What’s changing with Visa and the other card networks?
Marci: Yeah, this is where a lot of things are really shifting. Really, for a long time, payments were pretty simple from a data perspective. It was basically, yeah, did you send the data? Great. You qualify. And what I mean by this is with commercial and purchasing cards, you’d send the additional data, like Jon had mentioned, to qualify for reduced rates on level-two and three cards, and that was enough just to get the better rates. The data was collected and, with the transaction, passed to the issuers. The data was collected because it’s important that data really helps businesses, reconcile purchases, track their spending, and manage their budgets much more easily. And because of having this data, issuers over the years were really willing to incentivize merchants and businesses to send the data to get lower rates. Unfortunately, over time, there are a lot of shortcuts, and some providers were really just starting to fill in fields kind of willy-nilly to meet the requirement, whether the data was meaningful or not, and really, that’s what’s changing right now in this moment in time. Visa implemented something called CEDP. It’s the Commercial Enhanced Data Program, and it’s moving from just data transmission to data validation. So they’re utilizing an AI algorithm to check the data. And it’s no longer just, did you send the data? It’s is this data accurate? Does it tie to a real transaction? Does it match everything? And for industries like fuel, as Jon mentioned, you know, there’s even more requirements, fleet indicators, additional fields to require that AI validation. I think there’s like eight steps to jump through now. And on top of that, the structure is changing. As Jon mentioned, level two is going away. Product three is coming in, and now we even have to validate that data to be registered through Visa to qualify for the better rate. So in reality, we’ve gone from sending something and getting a discount to prove your data is real, or you’re gonna end up paying more. And that matters most for commercial and purchasing cards, because that’s where the cost but also the opportunity is. We shouldn’t be afraid of product three. It’s really just about making sure your transactions go through correctly and actually do qualify you to get the best possible rates.
Brian: So then, what happens if marketers keep doing things the old way? Is there a risk there?
Marci: You know, we’ve chatted about this a lot, and honestly, the biggest risk that marketers are going to face is that they don’t realize it’s happening, because nothing actually breaks. Your transactions still process. Customers still pay, everything looks fine on the surface, and that’s what makes this one really tricky. But behind the scenes, commercial card transactions, you know, they’re getting more expensive, and if you’re not set up for the new requirements, and your payment partner doesn’t really have the technology to pass the correct information, since interchange makes up the majority of your costs, it’s going to add up fast, especially because those are some of the already most expensive cards that companies are going to accept. So it’s not like you’re going to get hit with a big penalty on day one. It’s more like a slow-margin erosion, and it’s going to compound over time. And when you add in competition, man, if someone else is optimizing their payments and your business is not, they’re operating at a lower-cost structure than you, and that’s going to matter when they put their pricing out there for will-call customers, or even customers who are shopping for a new provider. So for me, the real risk isn’t the disruption created by Visa, it’s more that companies may fall behind because they don’t realize it, and it’s happening in the background.
Brian: So then, from a systems perspective, how important is the back office system, in addition to the payment gateway in getting this correct?
Marci: Brian, it’s super important because that’s where it’s starting to expose that payments aren’t just about the gateway anymore. It’s about the whole setup. It’s your back office, such as ADD. It’s your billing system; it’s your processor. They all have to work together to send clean, accurate data, and if one of these pieces is off, the whole thing really kind of breaks down from a cost perspective. And honestly, not a lot of systems were built with this in mind. Qualpay has been chatting over the years about technology, and this is really where marketers will see the difference between all of the different processors in the space. So having that integrated system like Qualpay really can help pass data more efficiently, because we can see what data is being passed and configure the gateway to accept and pass what is required by the card brands. Because going forward, it’s not about who can optimize behind the scenes. It’s about whether your system can actually produce and pass real, usable data and end to get you the best rates.
Brian: Excellent. Thanks, Marci. Jon, I’d like to turn back to you now. A lot of marketers rely on their monthly statements to understand their costs. Where can that fall short?
Jon: Well, I’m probably dating myself a little bit here, but I’ve been in the payment industry since 2008, when I first started working with Marci. And I can tell you that statements really haven’t changed a whole lot. You know, you get a breakdown of the card types you accept. You get the volume by card type, your cost by, your blended cost. Essentially, how many transactions did you run? What was the cost of those transactions in a very blended way. So you’re just getting that by the card brand. You’re also going to probably get, if you’re lucky, your processor is also going to show your interchange fees. But what’s really interesting is that there’s, even though the statements haven’t changed, the data really has, and the statements are no longer where you really should be looking for that information. And so what I am just striving marketers to do is just to use technology now, right? You know, we have 20 years of development here of cost allocation reporting, and so there are different things you can do with this data. So if you’re working with an integrated payment platform, you don’t need to just wait for your statement to come in first of all and see these fees. You can just click a button and see, okay, instead of just saying, across my entire business, what are all these blended costs? I can break this down by, where did I accept these fees? Was that the point of sale? Was it through my software company? Was it through my website? I can split these transactions off and then also understand the cost within each card brands buy this. I could also dive a little deeper and see at the customer level what kind of card did they pay with? Did they pay with a MasterCard or, you know, a Visa Rewards card? This information isn’t in your statement detail, but you can, with the right kind of processor, you can really get granular data here. And so what that also helps you do is, it helps you save your CFO or your office manager, because if you’re – right now, payments are very fragmented. And so if you’re looking at your, first of all, if you’re not working with an integrated processor, you could be getting one statement in from your point-of-sale device. You could be getting another statement that is the one that connects to your software company. And then you have a separate gateway statement and a separate ACH statement. And what I’m telling people is to import this data using these next-level reports called Cost Allocation Reports, which help you break down these costs at a very granular level by your division. And so instead of just dividing up this statement and uploading, if you’re one of these businesses that we see, very common with ADD, they’re multi-location marketers. They have 60 statements. We have customers with 60 or 70 statements; that CFO has the same process every single month. They’re uploading these statements, and they’re importing this data. This information should be available to you every day, and it should be available at the click of a button. You shouldn’t have to run these long sequences in order to make these pivot tables and so forth; the data should be there. We are in the data age here. The more that you can look at this data and really see and compare, especially across divisions here, we know with these companies that are acquiring other companies, this is a way where you could really say, hey, this one office here has much higher pricing because of this. And then you can actually solve these problems. What are the drivers of these costs here? Is it the card type? Is it the way they’re running this transaction? And all this can be enhanced, too, by having an account manager who can help you utilize this new technology, but also just kind of explain what’s going on behind the scenes and where there might be some room for improvement. So if there’s more levels, if there’s more ways that you can look under the rug for this information, the better, because the more data you have to make decisions, the better decisions you can make.
Brian: So then what should they be looking at instead if they really want to understand where they’re losing money?
Jon: Yeah, they need to go down to the transactional level of these transactions. You need to see if, with your account manager, if you’re getting all the breaks here through an audit. So not only are there the setup issues you see here with getting the utility rates or the commercial cards or not, but there’s other things. There are caps that you can initiate on certain card types. Certain debit cards have caps that you’re eligible for. And some of these systems that people use, these third-party gateways that are used for a whole bunch of different types of industries, they may not be set up in order to look at these very, very particular cost breaks that energy and fuel marketers get. If you’re a 50-location marketer, you know you don’t want to be running your business without your interchange, in quotes, your interchange account on your side here, and just making sure that you’re set up at 100% optimization so you’re not losing $15, $20 every single time that you swipe a card.
Brian: Okay, so Marci, for someone who’s listening who wants to get ahead of rising costs, what are some simple things they could start with?
Marci: Yeah, there’s a lot of changes as we’ve chatted about, but there’s also some really good news. There’s some pretty simple places to start. You don’t have to overhaul everything overnight. First, I’d say, just understand your card mix. A lot of people don’t realize how much of their volume is commercial or purchasing cards, and that’s where most of the increase and the cost really, really lives. It might only be three to five percent of your cards, but because those are higher-ticket transactions, it actually impacts the overall cost quite a bit more, because the interchange is going to be more expensive. So second, take a look at your data quality. As Jon mentioned, are you consistently sending things like a tax invoice or details? Are you sending AVS, not just sending data, but also sending it accurately, because now the data is actually getting validated and not just passed through. So make sure you’re working with somebody who can pass true data. And finally, make sure that you have visibility. If you can’t see where your costs are coming from or where those transactions are downgrading, it’s really hard to fix anything, because at the end of the day, interchange is the majority of your costs. And with hundreds of possible outcomes per transaction, really little, small improvements in the right places can make a really big difference.
Brian: Some great tips. Thanks, Marci. So Jon, looking into your crystal ball here, what changes in payments should marketers be preparing for over the next year and change?
Jon: Yeah, there’s a lot. We’re in a very rapidly changing industry right now, but consumer preferences are changing, right? So there’s just, if you want to get paid quickly, you need to provide a convenient way to do that. So I see a lot of marketers – they’re offering online payments. That’s a great thing to have: portal payments, online payments, easy payment pages to have. But what we’re looking at now is you’re also seeing a huge increase in fraud as well. So there’s a lot of bots out there that are trying to find websites, and they may have a couple 100,000 cards that they want to try and do 25-cent, $1 authorizations. This is called carding. And so, these sophisticated bots and cyber criminals are looking to validate stolen credit card information, and if your site is one of the unlucky ones that could get hit, a marketer may receive 100,000 charges overnight. And so, being able to counter this fraud with technology is huge, and just being able to understand what’s there. But I would say that the biggest change in payments is just in increasing your visibility into your data. Marketers are always looking to sharpen their edge and cut costs. And if you really just take a closer look under the hood and just get a level deeper, that’s where this money is saved. You know, everyone did the easy thing 10, 15, years ago. You got signed up for utility rates. And, you know, an emerging market rates to set up, but there’s, there’s a lot more cost-cutting that can be done. And from an operational perspective, if your CFO or your office manager is looking through 60 statements at the end of each month, how much time could you save if these reports were automated? And I know if you found an extra six or seven hours of a CFO’s time, they’d find a good way to spend it. And so, there’s little ways that you can sharpen your edge and increase your operational efficiency, while also protecting yourselves from external threats like fraud.
Brian: Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. If someone would like to get in touch with either of you prior to the BTC to maybe take this discussion a little further, how would they go about doing so?
Jon: Yeah, we’re always here and happy to help. The best way is just to shoot an email to energy@qualpay.com.
Brian: Well, Marci and Jon, I look forward to meeting up with both of you at the 2026 BTC, and I thank you for taking time out of both your days to speak with me today.
Jon: Thanks a lot, Brian. That was a lot of fun.
Marci: Thanks so much, Brian. It’s always a pleasure.
Brian: And to those listening, to learn more about the BTC and to register, visit addsys.com/btc. And to keep up with the latest happenings at ADD Systems, visit addsys.com/blog, or connect with us on social media by following ADD Systems on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or X. If you have any questions about ADDcast, feel free to reach out to us at addcast@addsys.com. Thanks for listening, and have a great day.
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