[saalweachter]

Actually, where are all of these numbers coming from in the first place? I know I've heard a lot about the "credit card tax", but I can't seem to pull the numbers off the public data on these companies.

Visa has $10.4 billion in revenue off of processing $4.4 trillion in transactions; that seems to make the credit card tax a mere 0.2%, which is off by an order of magnitude from the conventional-wisdom "credit card tax". Where does this mis-match come from? Is the revenue hidden, and Visa is taking in a few hundred billion in revenue? Or is the revenue potential just much smaller than conventional wisdom says? (eg, the 2-3% and $X trillion come from different classes of transactions, and shouldn't be combined.)

[patio11]

Visa is not the only party receiving money on the transaction: the processor/merchant bank and issuing bank also both receive cuts which dwarf Visa's.

[saalweachter]

Hmmm, that is definitely a part of the mystery.

According to their annual reports, Chase, Bank of America, Citicorp, and Wells Fargo had a combined $15.3 billion in card services revenue/card fees.

If you add that to the $7.4 billion in revenue from Mastercard, $10.4 billion in revenue from Visa, and $27 billion in non-interest revenue from American Express (of which $17 billion was "discount fees", which I think means cash-back), you're up to $60 billion dollars.

I feel comfortable going from $60 billion to $100 billion just extrapolating from the top companies to the rest of the industry.

Any guesses on where the extra $400 billion is going?