Issue #61: It Happened, And Nobody Noticed... Four acquirers published their average merchant fees two days before the deadline....

This weekly dispatch is specifically designed for restaurant and small business owners who are trapped in the daily grind and ready to move from "struggling artist" to strategic operator.

On Friday the banks had to publish what they charge you. I went looking for it. Finding it took me most of a day, and what is in it is worth your afternoon.

Last week I told you what was coming on Friday 30 October. For the first time in Australian history, the big acquirers had to publish what they actually charge merchants.

The obligation is real and it is specific. Large acquirers "are required to publish their merchant service fees each quarter as a percentage of card transactions acquired" [1]. And: "the first publication of data would be required by 30 October 2026" [1].

So I went to find it. Here is what that was like.

Four acquirers published, and they went early. CommBank, Westpac, NAB and ANZ Worldline all put a quarterly average merchant service fee report on their own websites [3][4][5][6]. The reports cover July to September.

None of the four states a publication date. The best evidence is the files themselves. The dates on the Westpac, NAB and ANZ Worldline documents all read Wednesday 28 October [6]. The 30th was the deadline, not the event.

They are findable, and almost nobody will find them. Westpac's and NAB's sit on dedicated pages inside their merchant support sections [6]. NAB went further than it had to and published a one-page guide to reading the table. ANZ Worldline's is three clicks into its support menu.

What none of them did was tell a merchant it existed. No email, no statement insert, no note on the portal. The obligation was to publish, and publishing is what happened.

The RBA has not done its half. It said it "will republish these data on its website soon after" [2]. That was the mechanism meant to put every acquirer in one place. Four days past the deadline, it does not exist [6]. Not on the payments data page. Not in the statistical tables. Not in a media release.

And Visa appears to have built a page and then taken it down. Visa Australia's own sitemap lists a wholesale-fees disclosure page dated 30 October. The page redirects to the Visa homepage. Two sibling pages updated the same day both load normally, so this is not a site-wide fault [6].

As far as I can tell, no Australian news outlet has written a word about any of it. Not the AFR, not the ABC, not SmartCompany, which covered the surcharge ban four times in September [12].

So the most transparent thing that has ever happened to Australian merchant pricing happened last week. The reason you have not heard about it is that nobody told you.

You are about to be among the first operators in the country to read it.

One number per bank, for merchants like you. "Small merchants" has a precise meaning here. The RBA defines it as merchants where the acquirer processes "$1 million or less in eftpos, Mastercard and Visa card transactions annually" [1].

One oddity for Westpac customers. Its published small-merchant average for the quarter is 0.79%, which is also the flat rate it advertises. Those are two different things measured two different ways. Do not read one as the other.

So unless you are putting more than a million a year through the terminal, this is your row.

Source: each bank's own published report for the September quarter [3][4][5][6].

Read the second column against the first. Across all their direct merchants — a figure the biggest ones dominate — these four averaged 0.55% to 0.58%. For small merchants the same four averaged 0.79% to 0.97%.

Small merchants as a group pay between about a half and three-quarters more than the all-merchant average at the same bank. That is a statement about two averages. It is not a statement about your rate, which could sit either side of it.

One caveat before you act on the column. NAB states its figures are "exclusive of GST" [5]. The other three state no basis at all. Until they say, treat a few basis points between banks as noise and the big gaps as real.

Foreign cards. Small merchants, same reports:

Source: each bank's own September-quarter report [3][4][5][6].

Same transaction, same card, and 50 basis points between the cheapest and the dearest of the four. If you are in a tourist suburb, that is the most useful line on this page next time you negotiate. Since 1 October you cannot pass it on.

A foreign card costs a small merchant roughly double a domestic one at every one of the four.

Card-present against card-not-present. A CommBank small merchant pays 0.73% on a domestic debit card tapped at the counter [3]. On a domestic credit card taken online or over the phone, 1.09% [3]. Westpac's equivalents are 0.60% and 1.03% [4].

That is the first time those splits have been published acquirer by acquirer, for merchants of your size.

One, and the bank says it first. NAB prints this above its own numbers: the average "is designed to help you compare your Merchant Service Fees with similar businesses. They are not your individual merchant service fee or a complete representation of all the costs associated with accepting card payments" [5].

That is honest and it is important. This is a benchmark, not a quote.

Two, the biggest lever you own is invisible in it. The RBA's own figures put a small merchant on a single-rate plan at 1.4% [10]. On an unblended plan, 0.9% [10]. And only 19% of small merchants are on the kind that is cheaper on average [10].

The published averages blend both together. So the one change most likely to cut your bill does not appear in the data published to help you cut your bill.

Three, if you are with Square, Zeller or Stripe, there is no report to compare yourself against. The obligation covers acquirers processing more than $10 billion "directly on behalf of merchants" [1]. And transactions "processed for merchants indirectly via a payment facilitator are excluded" [1].

None of those three published one. Whichever part of the rule is the reason, the effect is the same — and the segment that needed the comparison most is outside it.

This is the part I would print out.

CommBank publishes its small-business pricing, which most banks do not. A Smart terminal is a 0.99% flat-rate transaction fee with a $29.50 monthly rental, GST included [8]. The 0.99% covers Mastercard, Visa, Amex, JCB, eftpos and UnionPay, and CommBank notes that other cards may cost more [8].

And, in their own FAQ: "Yes, a monthly rental fee will be charged whether you take payments or not" [8].

Now put real volume through it.

My arithmetic on CommBank's published figures, not a CommBank table [8].

A quiet café doing $2,000 a month on cards is on 2.46%, not 0.99%. And the advertised rate never arrives, at any volume, because the rental never goes away.

Now run the same sum on any flat rate with no monthly rental. Take a quoted 1.4% with the hardware bought outright. It beats 0.99% plus $29.50 at every volume below $7,195 a month.

The arithmetic: $29.50 divided by the 0.41-point gap between the two rates. Above that turnover the cheaper headline wins. Below it, the dearer headline wins.

Check that any rate you are quoted really does include the hardware, because that is the whole of the difference.

Which means the question is not "what is your rate". It is "what is your rate at your volume" — and nobody selling you a terminal will put it that way.

Now the statement itself, and the single best thing I found all week.

Your statement may show a scheme fee. The name suggests Visa and Mastercard set it and your bank passes it on.

Westpac's own fee guide, effective 1 October 2026, says otherwise. Scheme fees, it says, are "calculated using rates which we set" [7]. The sentence in full is in the references.

Rates which we set. Not rates the scheme sets.

The same document says something similar about UnionPay interchange fees, which it also describes as "calculated using rates which we set" [7].

I am not accusing anybody of anything, and Westpac discloses more than most. It says the fee covers "the costs we incur from Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay" [7]. It reviews the rates quarterly, and your statement shows a weighted average rate [7].

The point is narrower and it matters. The number printed next to the words "scheme fee" is your bank's number, not Visa's. What you are not given is the scheme's own figure to check it against. So you cannot verify the pass-through from your statement. Asking for the rate and the calculation is a reasonable thing to do.

For contrast, here is a network publishing its own wholesale aggregates. eftpos reported that "the average eftpos interchange was 2.8 cents per transaction" for the September quarter [9]. Its average acquirer scheme fee was 2.2 cents gross, 1.9 cents after rebates [9].

That is not your rate either. It is the wholesale layer underneath it, published in cents. And eftpos is explicit that interchange, scheme fees and rebates "need to be considered together" rather than read one at a time [9].

The minimum. Westpac charges a $22 Minimum Merchant Service Fee where the month's fees "fall below $22" [7]. And it is charged per facility. Two terminals on two facilities is two minimums.

The 25% rule. Westpac's flat transaction rate has a condition on it [7]. Foreign-issued cards must be "less than 25% of the total card sales transactions processed through that facility" — counted by transaction, not by dollar.

So a venue where tourists are a tenth of the takings but a third of the taps can fall outside it. Westpac says it assesses this over a recent six-month period and will notify you before anything changes [7].

And the one that catches people on the way out. Westpac charges "a maximum fee of $550" where terminals are not returned, or are damaged "due to negligence or misuse during normal business" [7]. CommBank's equivalent is $500, plus $30 a chargeback [8].

From 1 April 2027, your statement has to carry more. Six transaction types per card network [11]. Domestic, split card-present and card-not-present, debit and credit. International, split debit and credit only, with no channel split. Each one with the value, the count, the fees and the average rate.

Two things to know about that.

It applies to "the first full statement period that commences on or after 1 April 2027" [11]. So your provider can lawfully keep sending the old format for another five months.

And it will still not show you the split you want.

The RBA will collect the interchange, scheme fee and acquirer margin breakdown from large acquirers for its own use [10]. It has decided not to publish that at acquirer level — in its words, that data "should not be published due to commercial sensitivity" [10]. Putting it on your statement was never the proposal.

The statement measure the RBA did consider and reject was carrying comparison data. It called that "expensive for acquirers and PSPs to implement", with benefits that are "uncertain" [10].

So the margin stays where it is. Which is why the arithmetic above, and the four questions below, are the only version of this you control.

Same working folder as the last two issues. Your statements are already in there if you did the walk-around.

Feed it three things. Last month's merchant statement, in full, every page. Your monthly card turnover. And your provider's name and plan type if you know it.

Run this first. It takes every charge on your statement and tells you three things. What it is, who it is really paid to, and whether it is negotiable. No statement explains that.

You need: one complete merchant statement, all pages.

You get back: one row per charge, with a plain-English translation, the real recipient, and a negotiable or fixed verdict.

It will flag anything it cannot identify rather than guessing, which is the point.

This is the one that produces the number that matters. Your advertised rate is not your rate once a monthly rental and a minimum are in it. This works out your real rate, and the turnover at which a different plan would beat yours.

You need: your monthly card turnover, your headline rate, and every fixed monthly charge.

You get back: your effective rate at your actual volume. The same rate across a range of volumes. And the crossover point against a no-rental alternative.

Now use the published numbers. This drafts the letter that puts your own rate next to your bank's published average. Then the four questions that actually move a price.

You need: your blended rate from Prompt #1, your card turnover, and your provider's name.

You get back: a short letter, under 200 words, with your number and their number in the first paragraph.

Pro Tip: Take this AI-generated content and add your personal touch. Change a word here, add a local reference there, include a quick story about a regular customer. The AI does the heavy lifting; you add the soul.

Two steps. Twenty minutes.

The struggling artist knows their rate because somebody told them once. It is on a welcome letter in a drawer, and it has a decimal point and a reassuring tone. The statement arrives every month and goes into the same drawer unopened. It is four pages of acronyms and there is a delivery at the back door. When the bill feels heavy they raise a price, because a price is the only lever they are sure they own.

The Savvy Operator does not trust the rate, because a rate is a sentence somebody wrote in a brochure. They read the statement, because a statement is a record of what actually happened. They know their blended figure and which charges are fixed. They know what their bank published last Friday. And they have asked four questions in writing. None of that took an afternoon.

Here is the whole thing in a line.

A rate is a promise. A statement is a receipt.

Last week the line was that the rate you were given is not the rate you have. This is how you find out. One of those documents was written to win your business. The other one is a record of what it cost you. Only one of them is evidence, and it is the one nobody opens.

One more thing, and it is the reason this issue exists.

The information arrived last week and almost nobody collected it. Four banks did what they were told to do, two days early. The regulator that promised to gather it up has not. No newspaper noticed. Not one bank told its own merchants.

A right you cannot find is not much of a right. But it is published, and now you know where it is, and that is the whole of the advantage.

Get last month's statement. Write card turnover, total fees, total fixed charges and your blended rate on the front of it, with today's date.

Then write 0.79%, 0.86%, 0.87% or 0.97% beside it, depending on who you bank with.

Twenty minutes, and you will know something about your own business that your bank has known for years.

Here is the honest problem with everything above. It is another job.

You already run a kitchen, a roster, a supplier list and a family. Nobody needs a fourteenth tab open.

So do not run it yourself. Set your AI up as a second brain for the business and let it hold the detail.

Not a toy. Not a chatbot you poke when you remember it exists.

A working folder that knows your menu, your prices, your hours, your reviews and your suppliers. And the twenty questions your team answers on the phone every week.

Feed it those things once and it stops handing you ideas. It starts handing you a scoreboard.

That is why I built Strategic AI Marketing. We set your AI up properly, on your real numbers, so it thinks with your business instead of guessing at it.

You do the cooking. It does the remembering.

One, and it is free. Get your AI Visibility Snapshot. Four assistants, twelve questions about your venue, written down and dated. You will know exactly where you stand by the end of the week. It is at strategicai.marketing/free-ai-marketing-snapshot.

Two, if the statement is still in the drawer. Reply to this email with one word: STATEMENT. Tell me your monthly card turnover, your total fees for the month, and who your provider is.

I will send back your blended rate and your effective rate at your volume. How it compares to what your bank published last week. And the four questions to put in writing. One page, your numbers.

No pitch deck. No discovery call unless you ask for one. One reply, one useful answer.

Next Week on The Savvy Operator: Your Hours Are Wrong And You Will Be The Last To Know. We are six weeks out from the period when your trading hours change most and get checked least. Public holidays, the shutdown week, the odd Tuesday you close. Every one of those is a fact a machine will repeat for weeks after it stops being true. And there is a four-day window in the middle of it that almost nobody has read about.

Until then, remember. A rate is a promise. A statement is a receipt. Serve your community. Be the operator.

Talk soon, Rowan

Rowan Shead

The Editor

The Savvy Operator

Owner of Strategic Ai Marketing

Every source below was downloaded as source text or PDF and string-matched on 03/11/2026. Nothing in this issue comes from a summarising read — a standing rule since a summarising tool handed me a sentence that does not exist on the RBA's website and I nearly published it in quotation marks in #59.

[1] Reserve Bank of Australia, Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging — Conclusions Paper, Appendix C, published 31/03/2026, read at source 03/11/2026. "Large acquirers are required to publish their merchant service fees each quarter as a percentage of card transactions acquired and also provide this information to the RBA. The first reporting period would cover the quarter ending 30 September 2026. The first publication of data would be required by 30 October 2026." Definitions, verbatim: "Large acquirers are acquirers that have processed more than $10 billion in eftpos, Mastercard and Visa card transactions directly on behalf of merchants for the designated networks in the last 12 months. Transactions processed for merchants indirectly via a payment facilitator are excluded, unless the payment facilitator is also a related entity of the acquirer." And: "Small merchants are direct merchants for which the acquirer processes $1 million or less in eftpos, Mastercard and Visa card transactions annually (or a pro-rated value each quarter)"; "Medium-sized merchants are direct merchants for which the acquirer processes between $1 million and $10 million."

[2] Reserve Bank of Australia, Conclusions Paper FAQs, downloaded as source text 19/10/2026. "30 October 2026: Designated card networks and large acquirers are required to begin publishing specified information about card payment fees on their respective websites. The RBA will republish these data on its website soon after." "Soon after" is the RBA's own wording and it sets no deadline.

[3] Commonwealth Bank, Average Merchant Service Fee, commbank.com.au/business/support/average-merchant-service-fee.html, labelled "Reporting Period; Quarter 3 2026", read at source 03/11/2026. All direct merchants 0.55%. Small merchants 0.86% — domestic card present debit 0.73%, credit 1.00%; domestic card not present debit 0.73%, credit 1.09%; foreign debit 1.75%, credit 2.00%. Medium-sized merchants 0.70%. The only one of the four published as an HTML table rather than a PDF.

[4] Westpac, Average Merchant Service Fee (MSF) — Report, PDF, reporting period stated as "01/07/2026 - 30/09/2026", read at source 03/11/2026, PDF creation date 28/10/2026. All direct merchants 0.55. Small merchants 0.79 — domestic card present debit 0.60, credit 0.94; domestic card not present debit 0.69, credit 1.03; foreign debit 1.93, credit 2.15. Medium-sized merchants 0.65. The PDF is the RBA's data template and still carries its instruction text, including "(Please enter: DD/MM/YY)" under the reporting period.

[5] National Australia Bank, Average Merchant Service Fee, PDF, reporting period "30/09/26", read at source 03/11/2026, file last modified 28/10/2026. All direct merchants 0.58%. Small merchants 0.87% — domestic card present debit 0.76%, credit 0.96%; domestic card not present debit 1.03%, credit 1.19%; foreign debit 1.57%. NAB is the only one of the four to state a GST basis: "All figures are presented as exclusive of GST." It is also the only one to publish a companion guide to reading the table. NAB's own disclaimer above the table, verbatim: "The Average Merchant Service Fee (MSF) shown in this table is designed to help you compare your Merchant Service Fees with similar businesses. They are not your individual merchant service fee or a complete representation of all the costs associated with accepting card payments."

[6] My own checks, 03/11/2026, by HTTP status code, raw page text and PDF metadata. The RBA has not republished: nothing on its payments data page, nothing in its statistical tables, and the latest entry on its "Changes to Statistical Tables" page predates the deadline. Visa: visa.com.au/about-visa/interchange-wholesalefees.html is listed in Visa's own sitemap with a last-modified date of 30/10/2026 and returns HTTP 301 to the Visa homepage; two sibling interchange pages updated the same day both return HTTP 200. A sitemap date does not prove a page was ever served, which is why this issue says "appears to". Publication dates: no report states one. The HTTP last-modified headers on the NAB and ANZ Worldline PDFs read 28/10/2026, and the Westpac PDF's own creation date is the same day. ANZ Worldline, Average Merchant Service Fee, reporting organisation "WANZ", reporting period "2026 Q3": all direct merchants 0.55, small merchants 0.97, medium 0.82; small merchants domestic card present debit 0.81, credit 1.16; card not present debit 0.86, credit 1.25; foreign debit 1.43, credit 1.89. Its report is an image inside a PDF with no text layer, so it cannot be searched, copied or read by a screen reader. I read it by rendering the page at 200 dpi. Its footnote defines small merchants as "less than $1 million", where the RBA says "$1 million or less" — a merchant at exactly $1m lands in a different row depending on the acquirer. Adyen Australia also has a fee-disclosure page, but it serves the report behind a script-driven button I could not open, so no Adyen figure appears in this issue. Discoverability: Westpac, NAB and ANZ Worldline each have a landing page for this in their merchant support sections, all returning HTTP 200 on 03/11/2026, and a plain search for a bank's name plus "average merchant service fee" finds them.

[7] Westpac, Your guide to merchant fees and charges, PDF, effective date 1 October 2026, read at source 03/11/2026. On scheme fees, the passage in full: "Scheme Fees are the fees we charge you to cover the costs we incur from Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay for processing your transactions." Then: "Scheme Fees are calculated using rates which we set as a percentage rate of the value of the transaction as well as on a per transaction basis." The same page states that the rates are reviewed quarterly and that "Your statement will show a weighted average rate". On UnionPay interchange fees — a different line item, and this issue says so: "These are calculated using rates which we set as a percentage of the value of the transaction and are based on our overall costs associated with UnionPay interchange fees." Minimum Merchant Service Fee of $22 charged where the month's cumulative merchant service, interchange and scheme fees "fall below $22", per EFTPOS or eCommerce facility. Flat Transaction Rate pricing "is only available for a Westpac merchant facility where sales transactions processed using foreign-issued cards represent less than 25% of the total card sales transactions processed through that facility." Equipment not returned or damaged: "A maximum fee of $550."

[8] Commonwealth Bank, EFTPOS terminal fees page, commbank.com.au/business/payments/eftpos-terminals/fees.html, read at source 03/11/2026. Smart terminal and Smart Integrated: 0.99% flat-rate transaction fee, $29.50 monthly rental. Smart Mini $59 outright. Fees include GST unless stated. Verbatim: "Yes, a monthly rental fee will be charged whether you take payments or not." Chargeback fee $30 per chargeback; terminal non-return $500; stationery $5 per tally roll six-pack. "No lock-in contracts: Cancel anytime, no fixed-term commitment… 30 days' notice should be given." The effective-rate table and the $7,195 crossover are my arithmetic on these published figures and are labelled as mine in the text.

[9] Australian Payments Plus, eftpos quarterly fee disclosures, auspayplus.com.au, read at source 03/11/2026. "The tables below show aggregate eftpos data for the quarter ending 30 September 2026." "The average eftpos interchange was 2.8 cents per transaction during the quarter." Issuer average scheme fee 4.3 cents gross, acquirer average scheme fee 2.2 cents gross. Net of rebates, the page states the issuer figure falls to 2.4 cents and the acquirer figure to 1.9 cents, and that interchange, scheme fees and rebates "need to be considered together" rather than read in isolation. AP+ also notes that these are "one component of the cost of accepting card payments" and that what a business pays depends on its provider, transaction mix and routing. AP+ is the only one of the three designated networks whose aggregates I could read; it converts them into cents per transaction.

[10] Reserve Bank of Australia, Conclusions Paper, Ch. 6 "Competition in Card Acquiring Services", 31/03/2026, downloaded as source text 19/10/2026. "On average, it costs a small merchant on a single-rate plan 1.4 per cent of their transaction value to accept card payments"; "a small merchant on an unblended plan would be charged a lower fee on average at 0.9 per cent"; "only 19 per cent of small merchants are on unblended plans." Averages across many merchants, not a rate any venue has been offered. This chapter is also the source for the two decisions quoted in the April 2027 section. The RBA will collect the interchange, scheme fee and acquirer margin split from large acquirers, but determined that "acquirer-level data on margins, interchange fees and scheme fees should not be published due to commercial sensitivity". Separately, it considered and rejected requiring acquirers to carry comparison data on merchant statements, on the basis that this "would be expensive for acquirers and PSPs to implement and the benefits are uncertain". Neither decision was about splitting the merchant service fee on your own statement, and this issue no longer says it was.

[11] Reserve Bank of Australia, Conclusions Paper, Ch. 8 "Impact and Implementation" and Appendix C, 31/03/2026. Additional merchant statement information applies from 1 April 2027, to "the first full statement period that commences on or after 1 April 2027". The required breakdown is by card network across six transaction types, each with transaction value, transaction count, total merchant service fees and the average merchant service fee. The domestic rows are split card present and card not present; the international rows are not split by channel. Acquirer interchange pass-through is first published by 30 January 2027. The claims about what the RBA declined are sourced to Ch. 6, not to this chapter — see [10].

[12] An absence, stated as one. I could find no Australian media coverage of the acquirer fee reports themselves in the window 28/10/2026 to 03/11/2026 — searched across general queries, acquirer-specific and network-specific queries, outlet-targeted queries naming the AFR, SmartCompany, Inside Retail and Banking Day, and body-targeted queries naming COSBOA, ACCI, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman and the Australian Payments Network. I also searched the distinctive phrases from the published tables, which would surface any article reproducing them. Nothing. SmartCompany has covered the surcharge reforms repeatedly, including a piece on 19/10/2026 that flagged the transparency regime as coming, but has not written about the published reports. An absence cannot be proven, only not yet disproven — but that is how hard I looked.

Strategic AI Marketing's own citation record — 0/12 on 26/05/2026 and every reading since — is published at strategicai.marketing/we-did-this/.