What is Level III Advantage?
Level III Advantage is a powerful solution designed to optimize B2B & B2G interchange rates, enabling businesses to minimize transaction costs and mitigate the risk associated with credit card transactions. Interchange rates, set by major credit card companies such as MasterCard and Visa can significantly impact a merchant’s expenses. By leveraging Level II and Level III data in their transactions, businesses can secure lower costs, avoiding standard rates and transaction downgrades.
Supported Cards on Level III Advantage
- MasterCard
- Visa
What is an Interchange Rate?
An interchange rate is a fee that a merchant must pay to a credit or debit card network when a customer makes a purchase with their card. The fee is charged by banks to cover the costs of processing the transaction, including the credit risk of the customer defaulting on their payment. Interchange rates are set by card networks, such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover.
Level I, Level II, and Level III interchange rates are different levels of data that merchants provide to credit card companies when processing a transaction. The more data a merchant provides, the lower the interchange rate will be.
Merchants who process a lot of business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-government (B2G) transactions can save money by using Level III interchange rates. This is because Level III data provides more information about the transaction, which helps the credit card companies to assess the risk of fraud.
Level III Advantage Key Benefits
Cost Savings – By including detailed transaction information through Level III Advantage, businesses can qualify for lower interchange rates, reducing their processing expenses (bin lookup for company cards to not overcharge). This translates to increased profitability and improved bottom line.
Risk Mitigation – Level III Advantage empowers merchants to mitigate risks associated with credit and debit card transactions. By complying with the requirements of Level II and Level III data submission, businesses enhance transaction security and reduce exposure to potential losses.
Competitive Advantage – Utilizing Level III Advantage enables businesses to outperform competitors by securing optimized interchange rates. This competitive edge allows merchants to offer better pricing to customers, attract new business partners, and foster relationships with large corporations.
How Level III Advantage Works
Our gateway platform optimizes data fields set by benchmarking data and your own merchant data from transactions. This allows us to provide instant access to Level II and Level III savings.
With Level III Advantage, submit a set of additional data elements with a credit card transaction. This data can include information such as the product being purchased, the quantity of items being purchased and the customer’s shipping address.
- The BIN Lookup Tool will automatically detect a business card entered in the Virtual Terminal, prompting the gateway to believe the merchant will benefit from sending additional data (Level III data) to the processor to improve transaction rates. Please see Level III Processing via the Virtual Terminal for more information.
- Merchants have an option to opt out of sending Level III data to the processor in their Virtual Terminal.
- If the merchant is not strictly a B2B merchant, they will only be billed for Level III Advantage transactions where a supported card type was identified or was explicitly requested by the merchant and only when Level III data is sent to the processor.
