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Level III Advantage

Updated

Table of Contents

What is Level III Advantage?

Level III Advantage is a powerful solution designed to optimize B2B & B2G interchange rates, enabling businesses to minimize transaction costs and mitigate the risk associated with credit card transactions. Interchange rates, set by major credit card companies such as MasterCard and Visa can significantly impact a merchant's expenses. By leveraging Level II and Level III data in their transactions, businesses can secure lower costs, avoiding standard rates and transaction downgrades.

Supported Cards on Level III Advantage

  • MasterCard
  • Visa

What is an Interchange Rate?

An interchange rate is a fee that a merchant must pay to a credit or debit card network when a customer makes a purchase with their card. The fee is charged by banks to cover the costs of processing the transaction, including the credit risk of the customer defaulting on their payment. Interchange rates are set by card networks, such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. 

Level I, Level II, and Level III interchange rates are different levels of data that merchants provide to credit card companies when processing a transaction. The more data a merchant provides, the lower the interchange rate will be.

Merchants who process a lot of business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-government (B2G) transactions can save money by using Level III interchange rates. This is because Level III data provides more information about the transaction, which helps the credit card companies to assess the risk of fraud.

Level III Advantage Key Benefits

Cost Savings - By including detailed transaction information through Level III Advantage, businesses can qualify for lower interchange rates, reducing their processing expenses (bin lookup for company cards to not overcharge). This translates to increased profitability and improved bottom line.

Risk Mitigation - Level III Advantage empowers merchants to mitigate risks associated with credit and debit card transactions. By complying with the requirements of Level II and Level III data submission, businesses enhance transaction security and reduce exposure to potential losses.

Competitive Advantage - Utilizing Level III Advantage enables businesses to outperform competitors by securing optimized interchange rates. This competitive edge allows merchants to offer better pricing to customers, attract new business partners, and foster relationships with large corporations.

How Level III Advantage Works

Our gateway platform optimizes data fields set by benchmarking NMI data and your own merchant data from transactions. This allows us to provide instant access to Level II and Level III savings. 

With Level III Advantage, submit a set of additional data elements with a credit card transaction. This data can include information such as the product being purchased, the quantity of items being purchased and the customer's shipping address.

  • The BIN Lookup Tool will automatically detect a business card entered in the Virtual Terminal, prompting the gateway to believe the merchant will benefit from sending additional data (Level III data) to the processor to improve transaction rates. Please see Level III Processing via the Virtual Terminal for more information.
  • Merchants have an option to opt out of sending Level III data to the processor in their Virtual Terminal.
  • If the merchant is not strictly a B2B merchant, they will only be billed for Level III Advantage transactions where a supported card type was identified or was explicitly requested by the merchant and only when Level III data is sent to the processor.

Level III Advantage is added to new Test Gateway Accounts so you and your merchant can test the service.

Enabling the Service | Partner Portal

Log in to your Partner Portal and head over to List Accounts → scroll to the merchants name from the list or search their name in the search box → click on their name → scroll down to the Value-added Services section → on the right side, click on the Update Services button → select the Status to 'Active', 'Not Offered', or 'Free Trial' → click on Submit. Please see Value-added Services for more information on what each action (active, not offered) does. This service has the option for a Free 30 day Trail. To learn more on free trials, please see Free Trials!. 

If a merchant does not have an active compatible processor for Level III data, you will be prevented from enabling Level III Advantage on that merchant account and you will see that the value-added service only has the “Not Offered” option. 

Partners can Mass Enable Level III Advantage. To learn more, please visit our Mass Enablement of Value-Added Services Knowledge Garden article.

If you do not have Level III Advantage added as a Value-added Services and you would like to have it added to be able to resell it to your merchants, please email support@nmi.com and request Level III Advantage to be added to your account. Please provide your Account ID, which is located on the top right corner when you log in, with your request.

Level III Supported Processors

For a list of supported processors, log in to your partner portal, and head over to the left side panel. At the bottom, under 'Help', click on 'Processor Matrix'. Supported processors will have a green check mark under the Level III column. 

Level III in Recurring Subscriptions

Level III data can be added to Recurring Subscriptions in the "Add Subscription" page, allowing merchants to save additional Level III fields to their recurring customers and get better interchange rates when we send it to the processor. 

Automatic Level III

Automatic Level III allows merchants using the Level III Advantage service to set up Level III data that will automatically apply to all transactions on their account and does not require the merchant’s software (NMI-made or from third parties) to support Level III. Please see Automatic Level III Merchant Template for more information. 

Partners also have the option to automatically add their own Level III template data to a merchant's transactions by enabling the feature within the merchants Advanced Merchant Features section. The flag is called "Automatically add my Level III template data to the merchant's credit card transactions". Please see Automatic Level III Partner Template for more information. 

Automatic Level III will add data to all transactions and will allow the gateway to send the data to a processor if:

  • The Account has the Level III Advantage service enabled AND;
  • The Processor has to support Level III data