On June 9, 2026, a federal judge in Brooklyn gave preliminary approval to a $38 billion settlement between Visa, Mastercard, and more than 12 million merchants. The deal would cut the average credit interchange rate by 10 basis points for five years and give merchants more room to add surcharges, according to PYMNTS and U.S. News. If you are interviewing for a payments product role this summer, a hiring manager may ask you what that 10 basis points changes. It is a fair question, and the answer rests on two ideas that sit under every card payment: interchange and take rate.
Plenty of people use Stripe every day and never trace the money. This post walks through the flow. Once you can follow a single card swipe end to end, most payments interview questions get easier to answer.
Where the money actually moves
Start with one card swipe. A shopper buys a $100 pair of shoes. The merchant does not receive $100. Part of it goes to the bank that issued the shopper's card, and that cut is the interchange fee.
Four parties touch the transaction: the cardholder, the merchant, the merchant's bank (the acquirer), and the shopper's bank (the issuer). Interchange is the fee the acquirer pays the issuer on every purchase. The merchant covers it, folded into the total processing rate.
Interchange is the largest piece of what a merchant pays. On a typical card sale, more than half of the processing cost is interchange that flows straight to the issuing bank. The issuer uses that money to fund credit card rewards and cover its own fraud losses. This is why your airline card hands you miles. Those miles are paid for by interchange.
Who sets the rate and who keeps it
People often miss one detail. Visa and Mastercard publish interchange rates, but they do not keep that money. That money stays with the issuing banks.
Visa and Mastercard run networks. They set the rules and route each transaction, and they earn separate assessment and network fees that are far smaller than interchange. So when someone says "Visa charges 2%," they are blending three fees that land in three different places. A complete answer pulls them apart: interchange to the issuer, network fees to Visa or Mastercard, and the remainder to the acquirer or processor.
Keeping those three buckets separate is the mark of someone who has worked close to a payments product.
Take rate is where the product earns
Now flip to the company you might work for. A processor like Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents for a standard online card payment, per its pricing page. On a $100 sale, that comes to $3.20.
Stripe does not keep $3.20. Most of it pays the interchange and network fees that Stripe owes the issuer and the card network. What Stripe keeps is the spread between what it charges the merchant and what it owes everyone upstream. That spread is the take rate, and it is the number that defines a payments PM's job.
Take rate explains most of the strategy questions you will get. Why does Stripe push merchants toward network tokens and wallets like Apple Pay? Higher approval rates mean more completed sales across the same fixed costs. Why do processors build their own card issuing and banking products? Issuing moves them to the side of the table that collects interchange rather than pays it. Each of these bets is a play on take rate.
Regulation keeps rewriting the math
Two rules matter, and both come up in interviews.
The first is the Durbin Amendment. Since 2011, debit interchange for banks with $10 billion or more in assets has been capped at 21 cents plus 0.05% of the transaction. The Federal Reserve proposed cutting the base to 14.4 cents in late 2023, and as of June 2026 that lower cap is not final. Debit and credit economics differ sharply because of this cap, and the cap is worth naming without a prompt.
Second comes the settlement from the top of this post. A 10 basis point cut to average credit interchange sounds tiny. On a business processing $1 billion a year, it is real money. The National Retail Federation still opposes the deal and has signaled it may appeal, so the final terms are not locked. Mentioning both the number and the open appeal shows you track the industry past the headline.
How to answer the question
Picture the classic version of the prompt. "Walk me through what happens to the money when someone buys a $50 item with a Visa credit card."
Answer in the order the money moves. The customer pays $50. The acquirer pulls interchange from that amount and passes it to the issuing bank, which is the single biggest fee. Visa takes a small network fee for routing and rules. The processor keeps its margin on top. The merchant nets what is left, often somewhere near $48.50 once everything clears.
Then add one line of judgment. Point out that the merchant's effective rate depends on card type, since a rewards card costs more than a plain debit card, and that rules like Durbin and the new settlement keep compressing these fees. That extra sentence shows real understanding.
You do not need to memorize every rate table. The essentials are the flow of the money, the names of the players, and a feel for where a payments product earns its margin. Learn that, follow one real story like the Visa and Mastercard settlement, and payments interviews start to feel like familiar ground.
Works cited
"Judge Signals Approval for Visa and Mastercard Swipe Fee Settlement." PYMNTS, June 2026, www.pymnts.com/credit-cards/2026/judge-signals-approval-for-visa-and-mastercard-swipe-fee-settlement.
"Visa, Mastercard $38 Billion Swipe Fee Settlement Wins US Judge's Approval." U.S. News & World Report, 9 June 2026, money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2026-06-09/us-judge-oks-visa-mastercard-38-billion-swipe-fee-settlement.
"Pricing & Fees." Stripe, stripe.com/pricing.
"Debit Card Interchange Fees and Routing." Federal Register, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 14 Nov. 2023, www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/11/14/2023-24034/debit-card-interchange-fees-and-routing.