Global Payments Fees: We Paid $26,197.63 and Faced a Wall of Unreadable Codes.

Our experience as a small business, with the receipts. Most of the fee codes on these statements made no sense to us.

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Between 2017 and 2019, we ran two award-winning CADMEN Barbershop locations, one in Mississauga and one in Toronto. Global Payments processed our card payments. Over that period, $26,197.63 in fees left our accounts, and most of the fee codes on our statements were codes we could not read or get explained; in our opinion, that was ridiculous.

The short version

• More than 60 distinct fee codes appeared on our Global Payments statements between 2017 and 2019.
• The glossary on our Global Payments statements explained only 10 of those fee codes.
• We paid $26,197.63 in fees across two barbershop locations.
• New fees were announced in fine print near the back of Global Payments statements as long as 16 pages.
• In our opinion, Global Payments' billing was not transparent, and based on our experience we would never recommend Global Payments.
• We were billed under more than sixty distinct fee codes; in our opinion, that is not normal, and had we known, we would have never signed up.

Every number below comes from our own merchant statements, and the screenshots are the statements themselves. We could not read our own bills well enough to understand what many of the charges were for.

Yellow highlights mark charges that are not obvious card-brand fees. Unhighlighted rows are ordinary Visa, Mastercard and Amex items.

A charge labeled MISCELLANEOUS

The billing page of one 2018 Toronto statement shows a single $390.00 line with the one-word description MISCELLANEOUS.

The detail pages break it into five codes: SET UP FEE $200.00, EDGE ANNL $50.00, PNCOMPFEE $40.00, SYSMAINTAN $80.00 and ADMIN FEE $20.00.

Even after finding the detail page, the codes themselves were never explained to us in plain language. What is EDGE ANNL? What does PNCOMPFEE cover? The bill never says.

Some codes were clear. VISA meant VISA. For the rest, we could only guess, and guessing at your own bill is not good enough. In truth, deciphering codes like PNCOMPFEE or EDGE ANNL was impossible because the bill gave us no explanation. In our opinion, that is completely unacceptable.

Even the last bill used unexplained codes

Our final Toronto statement in November 2019 rolled $85.00 into MISCELLANEOUS. The detail page shows three unexplained codes: ADMIN FEE $20.00, PNCOMPFEE $40.00 and DATASECFEE $25.00.

A wall of more than 60 fee codes. The glossary explains 10.

We counted more than 60 distinct fee codes on our statements. VINF. MCHV. VIBS. VISP. VIPP. MCPP. MCBS. IDP FLASH. VINF CDN HI-NET. MC XB CDN. VISA FGN PREM. DATASECFEE. RISK ASMT. NETWKACCES. PNCOMPFEE.

Look at the sheer number of them. There were settlement fees like SETTLEMENT and funds-transfer type fees like PUSH FUNDS. There were admin and service type fees like ADMIN FEE, PORTL SRVC and SET UP FEE. There were security and compliance type fees like PCI ADMIN, PCI NONCOM and DATASECFEE. There were system and network type fees like SYSMAINTAN, NETWKACCES and NETWORK ACCESS FEE. Across our statements, we counted more than sixty distinct fee codes. In our opinion, it is not normal for a payment processor to bill this many separate fees, and this is exactly the kind of thing business owners hate.

Each statement ends with a glossary. It defines exactly 10 of them.

Every fee code we were charged

Rows starting with VISA, VINF, VISP, VIBS, VIPP, MC, MCHV, MCEC, MCBS, MCPP, AMEX, IDP, DISC and DSBS are card network charges. The rest are the add-on layer this post is about. TAX rows are government tax charged on the fees.

These totals accumulated across ordinary monthly bills between 2017 and 2019, across our two locations.

A large share of the total was ordinary card network cost that every processor passes through. Our issue is the roughly $10,000 in add-on fee codes layered on top through codes we could not read or get explained.

The same label, charged twice in the same month

In one Mississauga statement, PCI ADMIN appears in the Discount section at $51.32. PCI NONCOM appears in the same section at $25.27. Then in the Other Fees section of the same statement, PCI ADMIN appears again as a flat $15.00 and PCI NONCOM again as a flat $5.00.

Four PCI-labeled charges, two sections, one month: $96.59.

Over our time with Global Payments, charges carrying PCI labels totaled $4,095.49.

New codes kept appearing in the fine print

• The Network Access Fee (NETWKACCES) was announced in the Notices fine print and took effect in June 2018. Its first month cost us $324.42 at one location.
• The Risk Assessment Fee (RISK ASMT) was announced in the fine print of an October 2018 statement, effective March 2019, with multiple components listed in the notice.
• A Data Security fee (DATASECFEE) was announced in March 2019 fine print, effective August 2019, and appeared at both of our locations the same month. At one location the fine print also included an annual charge, so its very first month cost $205.00.

Over our time as customers, new fees kept being added, and each one was announced in the Notices fine print near the back of the statement. Our statements arrived by mail every month and ran as long as 16 pages. When we called about new fees, we were told that notice had been given in the statement and that the window to raise it had passed. In our opinion, notice like that works precisely because nobody reads it. We do not know one business owner who has time to sit down every month and read a 16-page mailed statement line by line. In our opinion, that is not transparent and it is not upfront.

We called

As new fees kept showing up, we called Global Payments customer service more than once to understand them.

One call lasted 45 minutes. We got off the phone still unable to explain the fees we were asking about. In our experience, the representative did not seem certain what some of the codes covered either. That is how confusing the billing was from where we sat.

On other calls about newly added fees, the answer was that the fees could not be removed. We were told notice had been given at the bottom of our bills and that there had been a limited window to raise it.

The notices were real. They sat in small text near the bottom of multi-page paper statements that arrived every month. In our opinion, a new recurring charge deserves more prominent communication than fine print. We believe most busy owners would have missed it, because we did.

Our most expensive month still came with unreadable codes

Our most expensive month was at the Mississauga location: $1,140.14 debited in a single month from one barbershop. A bill charging that much still used codes we could not understand.

The questions the fee wall left us with

We are asking these honestly, because we never got clear answers while we were customers, and the time we spent with customer service did not produce them either.

1. Why are more than 60 different fee codes abbreviated to the point that a merchant cannot tell what they are paying for?
2. Why does the glossary explain only a fraction of the codes that appear on the bill?
3. Why does the billing summary compress five separate charges into the single word MISCELLANEOUS?
4. Why do PCI ADMIN and PCI NONCOM appear in two different sections of the same monthly statement?
5. Why are new fees announced in fine print on the back pages of a statement instead of in an email a busy owner would actually see?

Our opinion, clearly labeled as opinion

The numbers above are facts from our statements. What follows is our opinion and personal experience.

When we signed up, nothing in the sales conversation prepared us for bills carrying more than sixty different fee codes. Per our recollection, this was not explained to us before signing, although it may exist somewhere in standard paperwork. In our opinion, had we known this was what our bills would look like, we would have never signed up. Fees like these should be explained plainly before a business signs. Owners should not have to discover them later on monthly statements.

From our experience, the billing structure did not feel transparent to us. We felt misled. We tell every small business owner we mentor to read every line before signing with any processor.

What we would tell any owner facing bills like this

1. Ask for every fee code in writing, with a plain-language definition, before you sign anything.
2. Ask for a sample statement so you can see where every charge will appear.
3. Read the Notices fine print every single month. That is where new fees are born.
4. Find the dispute window in your processing agreement and diarize it before the deadline passes.

In our opinion, do not work with companies that bill like this. What is billing like this for? Is it to confuse you? Is it to tire you out until you stop asking questions? We asked, and after 45 minutes on the phone we still hung up not knowing what the charge was. In our opinion, there are better, more transparent processors to work with.

In our opinion, a bill you cannot read is a huge red flag from any company, including Global Payments. Those are companies to walk away from.

Based on our experience, we would never recommend Global Payments. In our opinion, the billing was not transparent or upfront, and new fees kept arriving.

It cost our barbershop $26,197.63 to learn how little we understood our own bills. In our opinion, that was ridiculous.

Based on our own experience, we would never recommend Global Payments. That is our honest opinion.

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Disclaimer

This post describes our own experience as a Global Payments merchant in Ontario between 2017 and 2019. Every figure comes from our own statements, which we kept and verified line by line. Every evaluative statement is our honest opinion. We allege no unlawful conduct, and the fees may have been permitted under the agreement we signed. Our questions are about disclosure and clarity, and Global Payments' pricing and practices may have changed since 2019. We have nothing to gain from this post and no affiliation with any payment processor. If Global Payments believes any figure is inaccurate, we welcome the correction and will update the post.