Visa introduced the Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF) in April 2012. The FANF is a monthly fee that is assessed on a merchant taxpayer basis and includes all merchant accounts owned by a business for credit card transaction processing. This fee can be quite confusing to figure out, so we will do our best to explain how it is calculated.
The amount of the FANF depends on the merchant category code (MCC), the mix of card present and card not present volume, and the number of locations the business operates. The FANF can vary from month to month for each merchant depending on these factors.
For many merchants who process all of their transactions in a card present environment, the amount of the FANF is based on the number of locations owned by the business, as shown in Table 1b below. (Please note that if merchants have any card not present volume for debit and credit card processing, they will incur additional FANF fees, which we will explain later.)
Visa modified the FANF in April 2015 so that payment facilitators were no longer permitted to aggregate taxpayer IDs and volume, meaning each taxpayer must be reported and billed individually. In addition, Visa reduced FANF rates for merchants with very low sales volume.