Jbcarioca: "The FTF is a fee imposed by a card issuer whenever a transaction is originated with an acquirer outside the issuers country. It has no logic in costs or justification other than additional profit fir the issuer."

1. At least in the case of 0.8% with mastercards, doesn't MasterCard inc. earn this, not the issuer?

2. If no foreign conversion occurred, can't FTF be justified by cost of cross-border settlement anyway?

For instance if Ba.com collected HKD679.00 from the uk. Assuming my hypothesis that BA received HKD and have not converted it is right, Visa has de facto HK$679 remittance for BA.

It might do this by offsetting, but eventually Visa will have to make some remittances to net settle its positions from time to time. Surely it is entitled to earn a fee for that?


The cheapskate is britishairways.com and others airlines having similar practices, for being able to perform multi-currency transactions at its head office and having card associations or customers pay the cost of patriating funds home (as opposed to using a merchant account in each country).