Rey Pasinli on the Hidden Economics of Payment Processing
Rey Pasinli returned to the Payments Experts Podcast with host Christopher Dryden of Global Legal Law Firm for an episode on a question most of the industry avoids in public: in a card transaction, who actually keeps the money?
The episode is called The Hidden Economics of Payment Processing: Who Really Profits? and it runs about forty five minutes. Play it right here:
Prefer your own app? It is on Apple Podcasts and Buzzsprout, and the rest of Rey’s interviews are collected on his author page.
What the conversation covers
The through line is margin compression. Processing margins have been shrinking for years while the cost of handling risk has gone up, and the episode walks through what that squeeze does at each level: to processors, to the agents and ISOs who sell for them, and finally to the merchant, who tends to absorb the result without ever being told why.
From there it moves into the ground Total-Apps works in every day:
- Account terminations, and why a merchant is often told nothing useful about the reason for one.
- Visa's VAMP programme and Mastercard's merchant monitoring, and what the current enforcement climate means for a merchant already close to a threshold.
- TC40 fraud reports, and the lag between a cardholder's fraud claim and the moment it shows up against a merchant's account.
- Chargebacks and friendly fraud, where the dispute is not really about fraud at all.
- Surcharging and cash discounting, and the compliance detail that separates a legal programme from an expensive mistake.
- Underwriting, portfolio diversification and where fraud prevention is heading next.
Why this one is worth the time
Most payments content is written to sell a merchant account. This is a payments attorney and a payments engineer talking about the economics underneath the product, including the parts that do not flatter the industry. If you have ever read a processing statement and not understood what you were paying for, that is the gap the episode is about.
It is a conversation, not legal advice, and nothing in it is specific to any one merchant's situation.
Related reading on this site
- Chargebacks in 2026: what high-risk merchants are facing, for the thresholds and where they moved.
- Chargeback defence for large-ticket merchants, where a single dispute carries real weight.
- How affiliate traffic affects a chargeback ratio, if your dispute rate moved without your product changing.
- The knowledge base, for direct answers on reserves, terminations, underwriting and thresholds.
- All guides by vertical, and Rey's other appearances.
