Well I don't really know what they do, but what I know is that Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €.

All of them do the same : ensure I get the money from the customer. Of course it's a larger project to run this in the whole world, but shouldn't it scale to less along with the number of billions of customers instead of the other way round ?

This is an insane amount of money. They killed micro-transactions, they killed the business model of the Web in favor of ads, the only popular way to do microtransactions right now.

> Visa transactions costs are 0,22 € out of a payment of 1 €, Mastercard's is 0,23 €, and the French CB network is 0,17 €.

Are you sure of these values? Because that's different from what I was told, which was that CB was cheaper for transactions of more than 10 €, because their fees were fixed, not rates like Visa and Mastercard.

From what I've just read (not counting the possible extra tax by the bank of the seller):

CB: 0.20% + 0.00117 € ⇒ 0.00317 € for 1 €, 0.20117 for 100 €

Visa: 0.20% + (0.01% to 0.014%) ⇒ up to 0.00214 € for 1 €, 0.214 € for 100 €

Mastercard: 0.20% + (0.15 to 0.17%)

The 0.20% is for the "interchange" described in the article. So it applies only when the seller and the buyer do not have the same bank. The maximal rate is fixed by the UE, and AFAIK everyone use the max value.

They charge you 23%?

I thought in the EU the maximum interchange fee for consumer credit cards is capped at 0.3% of the transaction value.