Level 2 and Level 3 data: lower interchange on corporate cards

If your customers are businesses, a large share of your card volume arrives on corporate and purchasing cards. Those carry some of the highest interchange, around 1.70% for a standard corporate card. The card networks offer a lower rate on them in exchange for more information about the transaction. Most processors never set it up.

The three levels

Level 1 is a consumer transaction: amount, date, merchant. It is the default for everything.

Level 2 adds business detail: customer code, tax amount, tax identifier, purchase order number. It is what a corporate cardholder’s accounts-payable team wants to see on the statement, and the networks price it lower.

Level 3 adds line-item detail: item description, quantity, unit cost, commodity code, shipping, discounts. It reads like an invoice, and it earns the lowest rate the card qualifies for. The networks price it lower still, because a fully described transaction is lower risk and lower dispute.

What it is worth

Submitting Level 2 and Level 3 data targets corporate and purchasing cards specifically and can reduce interchange on those transactions by up to 1.5%. A distributor processing $10,000 invoices at consumer retail rates is the textbook case: the data is already in the invoice, it is just not reaching the card network.

What it takes

The data has to be captured and passed at authorization, which means your invoicing or order system and your gateway have to be set up to send it. This is configuration, not new hardware: the fields exist in most B2B invoicing flows and the enterprise gateways we work with support them. It is one of the first things we check on a B2B statement, because it is a pure saving on volume you already have.

Level 2 and 3 are part of the enterprise payments setup and the B2B stack. The free audit will tell you how much of your volume qualifies.