Peter So what you are saying is that when I pay €100 to a merchant with my card, only €99,30 is actually transferred to them?
This is contrary to any economic principle. You might have misread the first article you’re quoting.
When you apply for a card, you will be charged for the issuing of the card by the card issuer (i.e. bunq). They have to pay Mastercard Inc. for the license to issue branded cards and have to pay a provision on the spendings with a card issued by them.
At bunq we pay for out cards via the subscription fees and other banks charge customers as well via monthly fees, an annual fee or via hidden costs such as withdrawing fees.
The other side of the transaction is the merchant at which we pay with our cards. They are charged too for the ability to accept Mastercards at there store.
They are charged by their providing banks a provision of 0,3% on the transaction (in the EU, outside the EU the fees are mostly higher). This is (partial) the fee that receiving banks have to pay to Mastercard to connect to the Mastercard network and thus being able to provide their customers with acces to the network to allow them to accept Mastercards.
These fees are charged monthly by their banks to the merchants on their banking costs invoices. These are operational costs for the merchant and as such are considered in their profit and lost balance.
So when I pay €100 with my card, the merchant actually gets €100 from his bank and not a penny (cent) less. He needs the full amount to pay for his costs, amongst which are his banking costs and thus the transaction fee of 0,3%.
This is where Mastercard gets paid on a transaction. Besides exchange provisions when currency is exchanged, this is the main source of income for the Mastercard company.
However bunq gets some kind of commission for each payment done with a Mastercard. I haven’t quite figured out how this works, but I am pretty sure this is (together with the subscription fees) where bunq earns the money to pay for the trees.
Transparency is not the forté of banks in general and it may be that bunq is lacking transparency on this subject due to legal obligations such as a NDA-clause in their agreement with Mastercard or in their banking licences.