Episode Details

A “credit card fee” can protect your margins or quietly create compliance risk, and the difference usually comes down to one word: clarity. We sit down with Jim Oberman, CEO of Payroc, to unpack credit card surcharging in a way that merchants, software platforms, and payments teams can actually use, without hand-waving and without confusing it with every other fee customers see at checkout.

We start with the fundamentals: what surcharging is, why it exists, and why it applies only to credit cards, not debit or prepaid. Then we cut through the biggest source of mistakes by separating four commonly mixed concepts: surcharging, dual pricing, convenience fees, and service fees. From there, we get practical about the rules that matter in the real world, including Visa’s 3% surcharge cap becoming the de facto standard, Mastercard’s different limit, and how brand enforcement programs and secret shopping can expose sloppy implementations.

The bigger story is why surcharging has taken off so fast. Technology now makes it possible to present buyer choice at the exact moment of payment, across online and in-person experiences, with options like debit, ACH (electronic check), and emerging rails like real-time payments. Jim explains why embedded payments and ISVs increasingly treat surcharging as more than cost recovery: it can be a strategic feature, a trust-builder, and a way to keep reconciliation and settlement clean for merchants at scale.