[iamacyborg]

Fees are definitely where the money is made in the payments sector, however, most proper terminals are leased so that represents a fairly large source of revenue for merchant service providers. A company I worked for were leasing terminals starting at £20 a month, and then took a cut of transactions plus a whole host of other bolt-ons like PCI non-compliance fees (which is it’s own racket, they’re not incentivised to ensure merchants are PCI compliant because it’s a significant revenue stream).