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Business owners are all too familiar with merchant account downgrades. These downgraded transactions cost more money to process, and are typically referred to as mid-qualified, or non-qualified transactions.

Transaction downgrades can occur for a variety of reasons, like failure to batch on-time, use address verification (AVS) on card-not-present transactions, or keying in a card present transaction. While these downgrades are due to improper operations and can be controlled (for the most part), other downgrades cannot be avoided; these are card type downgrades.

Here are the credit cards that will process at a higher rate.

Business cards
Corporate cards
Reward cards
Government cards
Foreign cards

Strict card association rules prohibiting payment card discrimination prevent merchants from refusing these cards. Doing so could result in a terminated merchant account file (TMF). Merchants may not be able to control card type downgrades, but knowledge of their existence can help merchants understand their monthly processing statement better. An understanding that can be used to reduce controllable merchant account downgrades.