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Differences between Standard & Premium Credit Cards
Differences between Standard & Premium Credit Cards

Learn the differences between Standard & Premium Credit Cards and the reason why we're not always able to identify the difference.

Pat Kuo avatar
Written by Pat Kuo
Updated over 4 months ago

What is the difference between standard and premium cards?

Standard cards include:

  • MasterCard, VISA and Discover consumer credit and debit cards that are not linked to specialty rewards programs.

Premium cards include:

  • Most MasterCard, VISA, Discover, and AMEX business/corporate credit and debit cards.

  • MasterCard, VISA, Discover, and AMEX credit cards linked to specialty rewards programs (i.e. Qantas, Velocity, Bank rewards...etc).

Approximate percentage of card types used in each country

The table below is an approximate percentage of standard vs premium cards that are processed by Ignition in each region.

Depending on your country, it may be common for credit cards to have rewards programs attached which causes premium processing fees to be applied. This means you may see a higher number of premium card charges.

Standard

Premium

United States

25%

75%

Canada

30%

70%

United Kingdom

45%

55%

Australia

85%

15%

If youโ€™d like to see which customers are using premium cards you can navigate to Payments โ†’ Payouts โ†’ Export โ†’ Collections and clawbacks to generate a report of all transactions with the associated payment processing fees.

How can I identify that a client has used a premium card?

We cannot fully confirm whether or not your client's card is a standard or premium card before it is processed. We are only able to determine this after payment processing occurs and the transaction is complete.

Unfortunately, credit card companies do not disclose this information, nor do they publish lists of their standard vs premium cards. The lack of information means we cannot provide guidelines on all the different cards in the market.

Why does Ignition make a distinction between card types?

Most of the fees paid for payment processing go to the credit card networks. The fees charged by the credit card networks are highly variable, based on card type.

By having two tiers of pricing (Standard and Premium), we can offer the most competitive rates for most cards (Standard cards) while also offering the most choice to customers (by accepting Premium cards too).

Identifying a standard vs premium credit card charge in Ignition

Once the credit card transaction has been processed, we provide as much transparency as we can in the specific invoice and also the Payments tab to identify any premium transactions.

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