The fee nobody names

A Swiss invoice, a customer in Portugal. On paper one transaction, in practice four: an authorisation on the card network or a transfer in SEPA, a conversion, a hop through a correspondent bank, a credit in SIC.

Each of those systems runs its own clock. SEPA counts in banking days. SIC runs for as long as the Swiss National Bank keeps the system open. A card authorisation is seconds old, its settlement is days old. Lay those clocks side by side and it becomes obvious why collection and payout rarely land on the same date, and why a payment started on a Friday evening tells a different story than the same payment on a Tuesday morning.

The costs are distributed just as unevenly. The fee that gets named is usually the smaller one: the discount rate, the gateway fee, a fixed amount per transaction. The larger one sits in the exchange rate, as the spread between the rate actually applied and the rate the market showed that day. It appears on no line, because it was never booked as a fee. It is simply a slightly smaller number.

This is exactly where a statement that is true parts company with one that merely balances. Both show the same closing figure. Only one says where the difference came from.

Newton Pay is designed around that line. Collection and payout stay apart, even when they happen on the same day. The currency collected and the currency paid out both sit on the record, together with the rate applied and the moment it was taken.

This does not solve the problem. A conversion costs money whoever discloses it. It makes the cost negotiable: a fee with a name can be compared, and a provider who discloses it has to defend it.