The Payments Experts Podcast
Expert payments attorneys discuss the electronic payments industry from a legal perspective.
The Payments Experts Podcast
Dual Pricing Done Right: 2026 Practical Guide To Cash Discount And Surcharging Compliance | PEP106
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Surcharging caps. Debit card limits. Fines that flow through banks. If you’ve ever wondered who really profits from card payments, this conversation will change how you see
Checkout is turning into a trust test. Customers hate surprise fees, merchants hate absorbing card costs, and the rules around surcharging, cash discount, and dual pricing keep getting more confusing. We sit down with Clark Krimer from National ePayment (https://nationalepayment.com/) to get practical about what actually works at the point of sale and why so many business owners only change pricing once the shop next door does it.
We break down why merchants hesitate to adopt dual pricing and what actually happens when customers see a cash price next to a card price. Clark Krimer explains how payments sales works in the real world and why better pricing disclosure is the missing piece in credit card processing.
• merchants waiting for nearby businesses to adopt dual pricing first
• why customers assume surcharges are merchant profit
• how dual pricing differs from surcharging and cash discounting
• Visa-style disclosure expectations and the operational challenge of changing prices
• Do Price Digital Labeler printing cash and card prices
• California restaurant fee disclosures and why menus create risk
• how fines and enforcement pressure flow through banks and processors
• why payments education stays low and transparency stays hard
We talk through the real economics of credit card processing fees: why a simple surcharge cap often fails to cover the full spread, why debit card restrictions complicate “pass-through” pricing, and why customers often assume the merchant is pocketing the difference. From there, we dig into the compliance problem that trips up otherwise honest businesses. If a fee is disclosed poorly, especially in restaurants and other high-traffic environments, it can trigger complaints, fines, or even litigation. The conversation also touches California’s junk fee environment and why menu disclosure is becoming a legal flashpoint.
Then we get hands-on with a surprisingly effective fix: Do Price Digital Labeler, a tool designed to make dual pricing easy in retail by printing a single label with both the cash price and the card price. It’s a small operational detail with a big impact on price transparency, customer clarity, and brand rules alignment.
If you care about payments compliance, merchant services strategy, or the future of surcharging and dual pricing, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a merchant who is struggling with fees, and leave a review with your take: should the customer see two prices everywhere?
**Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.**
PEP Links:
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A payments podcast of Global Legal Law Firm
Do Customers Reject Dual Pricing?
SPEAKER_00What do you see in the field of merchants complaining about the dual pricing, surcharging?
SPEAKER_02Well, a a lot a lot of them don't want to do it because they don't want to scare away their customers. You know, they don't want to do it unless their next door neighbor is doing it. Of course. Right. They would they wait for one someone in on their block on their street, another another business, to start doing it. Once they start doing it, then they usually say, I will start doing it. They don't mind doing it. They just don't want to be the first ones to do it.
SPEAKER_00Right, because they're scared that you're gonna scare your customers off. But do they?
SPEAKER_03Correct.
SPEAKER_00But are customers, our card holders detracted from doing this? I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I don't converse with normal people, so welcome to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Clark’s Path Into Merchant Services
SPEAKER_00Clark, so tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us how do you end up in the wild western world of payments?
SPEAKER_02Oh book, it's been like 25 years already. Um how I ended up, I I it's a long story. You want me really to get into it? Let's go for it. Tell us. All right, so if it's good. I mean, I graduated college, I applied online, you know, for an intro job in sales. And you know what? They were paying $7,000 bonus up front. I was 20 years old, you know, why not? So I figured, you know what, let me get the $7,000. So I got the $7,000. I went to work in some place in Manhattan, New York City. It was for fifth, third bank. They were about maybe 10 people working there, all agents selling on the street, door to door. So I was like, you know what, let me try this. Might as well, right? So whoever whoever sells the most gets bonuses and gets like, you know, most of it was leasing at the time, terminals. Right. I figured in order for me to get $7,000, it was a month later, I figured I have to sell something, right? So what what did I do? I contacted my brother-in-law, who's very big in the photography industry, and he introduced me to all his clients. So I was the number one salesperson there. Then they got closed down and they transferred me to Independence Bank, a community bank out in the uh Brooklyn, New York. From there, that's where it all started.
SPEAKER_00That's when the floodgates opened.
SPEAKER_02That's it. And then from there, I went to uh I partnered up with some other individuals that were in the space that just started working in the space. And here I am today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah,
Selling Payments In New York
SPEAKER_00I mean, I've always thought, you know, New York in particular, it's gotta be just a killing for merchant services, particularly back in the day when you're just going in and people are like, well, I don't even accept credit cards. This is great. Um, which you, you know, you weren't quite at, but probably some of the people you ran into were still running knucklebusters, right? 25 years ago. So a lot of people. I always think New York. Yeah, New York, I mean, you could you could hit 50 businesses in a day, you know, on your two blocks, right? That's true. So as a compared to like rural area where a lot of people, you know, have come from and started out is you know, one or two, you know, two or three businesses a day, and you're shuttling between. So I always feel like you the East Coast, particularly back in the day, you had such a big big advantage. So when did you uh when did you decide to get out on your own?
SPEAKER_02I mean, uh I was I was already, I would say, I was already five years in with Independence Bank, Community Bank. I was five five years in, and then a friend of mine introduced me to another friend of his, and uh he was opening up his own ISO office, and then here I am, and then we partnered up, and then that's how I became working with for national e-payments.
What Makes A Strong ISO Agent
SPEAKER_00And how do you guys, when you're in the space, you know, what what are you looking for in an agent other than just yourself?
SPEAKER_02I mean, someone that's someone that's gonna work, that's number one. Someone that wants to work in this industry, not just working for like a month or two, you know, that that's really committed to working in this space.
SPEAKER_00There's some there's some ISOs out there, like NAB is one of them, where they built their whole model was get people in for a couple months, you know, and they they assign over or they refer over their aunt, their brother-in-law, this account, and then they wash out and they're going, Great, I got five accounts from this person, I don't have to pay them anymore. And that was their whole model for a while. Do you guys ever look for anything like that of, you know, trying to just get people in and get as many deals?
SPEAKER_02No, we look at for loan service. Some of that's gonna grow with us.
SPEAKER_00How do you find those people? You know, I was just looking on Facebook. There's a market, you know, the groups on there of people, you know, I'll see people coming in. Hey, I've been, I was just reading one. Hey, I've been in selling cars, you know, I'm looking to get over to merchant services, and you know, the talons are out in that little group. They're like, meet, come on. You know, are you is there any skill set that you're looking for for agents out there? Or probably a better question is what kind of agents, what kind of person is gonna do really well in this industry?
SPEAKER_02Well, someone that's comfortable with people, someone that's the that doesn't mind talking. I mean, what we usually do, we don't take people from the industry themselves. We bring them in and then we train them and then we let them go, let them out in the field.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, I mean, uh, we we for years, we still have one to some degree, but early on, we would keep a list of agents who are known for to jump from ISO to ISO and each time they flip their deals and try and take their agents. So, yeah, there's a lot of players, and I think a lot of them have mostly washed out, but I can see that you're going, look, within the space, I'm not really looking for guys that are jumping ship from one place to another, but I will find people that have been at the the really big ISOs and just kind of didn't know, you know, they're still getting a 50% split or, you know, and some bonus. I'll find those people are, you know, can be pretty attractive when you actually give them the tools and the training and the compensation that you can find some talented people out there.
Why Dual Pricing Beats Surcharging
SPEAKER_00Now tell us a little bit about national e-payment. What are you guys focusing on now?
SPEAKER_02Well, we're, you know, we're a lot in pricing transparency and compliance. So, you know, we have another, we created another brand called Do Price Dig uh Digital Labeler. So we're focusing really on that. That's for merchants in the in the due pricing field. Um, you know, anyone that's in cash discount, I can't say cash discount, but due pricing.
SPEAKER_00I saw that at the conference and it was it intrigued me because I was like, why have why hasn't somebody done that already? So a little background on the dual pricing is the current visa rules and regime that they say they don't have, by the way, is that you have to list if you're gonna do a surcharge, but it's not a surcharge, if you're gonna do a cash discount, a credit card versus a cash price, you have to list both prices like a gas station. And I always joke, that's really easy for the gas station when they sell four products regular, unleaded, diesel, you know, normal. But when you go inside, what do you do when you're getting on the rack down to the rack and the prices are changing every day? So it sounds like you guys have given like a really good tool because the problem is the surcharging, the 3%, that doesn't cover the merchant's fees, certainly. And it makes a really low margin for the sales organization. So really dual pricing is the only way to actually make money as an ISO and to for the merchant to actually cover the costs of card acceptance. Is that right? Yep, that's exactly right. So what what to explain exactly what your your uh system does, even though it, you know, it's pretty straightforward, but I'm going, why wasn't no one doing this?
SPEAKER_02Okay,
The Label Tool That Prints Two Prices
SPEAKER_02so it's pretty simple. So it's a label gun to price your you know your product or your you know, anything in retail. It could be clothing, it could be uh a smoke shop, it could be a grocery store, anything in the retail where you have to it what it does is it automatically calculates for you the surcharge, the 3%, the 4%, it calculates for you automatically. So you put in the price of the product or the item, and then you put in the percentage. So what it does is it calculates for you automatically, and then it prints out a label that has the cash price and the card price on one label.
SPEAKER_00Right. And that's perfect. And it's not so you're you know, you're not calculating the surcharge, you're going, here's the difference, here's two prices. But I like that you're actually tying it to that because the thing with cash discounting is you can do whatever. There's no, you know, you could charge 50 bucks more as long as you're telling everybody that. So
Disclosure Rules And Restaurant Menu Risks
SPEAKER_00the the reason that this is so important is there are, you know, California has our surcharging law is um, you know, it's gotta be disclosed. We've got the junk fee legislation, but they carve they carved it out for restaurants. So they're saying, restaurants, look, because your margins are so thin, you guys can still do it. You can still surcharge whatever you want. So, what a lot of California restaurants are doing is they're just putting something on the menu at the bottom. Oh, by the way, there's a you know, um inflation fee or a service fee or a health benefits fee of four or five percent, six, seven percent. And they've said in California, they're saying they're exempt, but what they're not exempt from is if I didn't see that. So the right way to do it for a restaurant is two prices on the menu going down the list. In my opinion, as somebody who's litigating these issues, I think these restaurants have a problem. I think every, you know, almost every business has a problem unless you're doing the dual pricing. Because, like you said, the surcharge doesn't cover the spread, and you can't do it on a debit card. And a lot of people are using debit cards.
SPEAKER_02Right, I agree with you. You know, out of uh over here on the East Coast, we see uh for the restaurants, for example, we actually change the menus for them. We actually we offer to do the menus for them. We'll pay for the venues, we'll pay for the change, just so they can uh become a compliant.
SPEAKER_00Right. Because there's there's secret shoppers still out there. I'm hearing less and less of it, but they're still out secret shopping and putting fines down. And the whole reason this is set up this way is according to Visa, from the mouth of Visa, the person who made these changes, is they want to cap the fees that our merchants are charging because otherwise the regulators are gonna come and say you guys are charging too much. And meanwhile, I'm going great. Cap the fees that they can charge. That doesn't mean I can't charge more as the as the merchant or whomever, but these guys are making too much money.
Visa Caps Fines And The Legal Squeeze
SPEAKER_00So one thought that we're having here, so we tried to sue Visa for this, saying, hey, this is unfair, you know, anti-competitive, you're capping these, you're finding the ISOs and everything, and it didn't work because Visa is Visa, and they have you know tremendous power, but they also have legally collect rule. They're going, well, we're not fining the ISO, we're finding the bank. And then the bank is passing it on to the processor, and the processor's probably probably passing it on to you. So, really, you know, the only one that can sue us would be the bank, and the bank's not going to sue them because the bank's making all the money from it, so um, and has no, you know, liability or loss, like most banks do. So the next move here is we got we're just trying to raise awareness for this of how do we shake this out to get visa to back off? Because my compromise was always going to be, and it wasn't my shot to make, sounded good is raise the charge to four or five percent and let us do debit.
SPEAKER_03And they're saying, well, the Durban Amendment doesn't allow that.
SPEAKER_00Your visa, pretty sure you could rewrite the Durban Amendment if you so wanted to, to allow that, to explain, well, this allows the merchants to make money and the customer, as long as you're informed, I don't care. I'm gonna pay it. You know, what when I come in, you know, maybe if I'm buying a big ticket item, yeah, I need to know there's gonna be five percent, and maybe I'm maybe I'm not going here. But like at a restaurant, what? You know, sometimes I'll be like, okay, I'm not gonna order the lobster today because it's too expensive, but I'm not gonna not eat there because there's a 5% charge.
Customer Perception And The COVID Shift
SPEAKER_00What do you see in the field of merchants complaining about the dual pricing surcharging?
SPEAKER_02Well, a lot a lot of them don't want to do it because they don't want to scare away their customers. You know, they don't want to do it unless their next door neighbor is doing it, of course. Right. They wait they wait for one someone in on their block, on their street, another another business, to start doing it. Once they start doing it, then they usually say, I will start doing it. They don't mind doing it, they just don't want to be the first ones to do it.
SPEAKER_00Right, because they're scared that you're gonna scare your customers off. But do they?
SPEAKER_03Correct.
SPEAKER_00But our customers, our cardholders detracted from from doing this? I don't know.
SPEAKER_02I don't converse with normal people, so I mean, I would I would say yes. I I mean they do complain, but they do they you know, they don't think it's right because they actually think that the merchant is collecting the profit of the difference, right? Of the 3%, 5%, whatever the dollar amount, the surcharges. They think that they are it's they're pocketing the funds.
SPEAKER_00It's a great point. Yeah, it is a good point too. And when I see like employee benefit plan or like it's like health insurance for the employees, like paying for your health insurance, I gotta pay for my health insurance. Pay for your own. So yeah, I think they see it as a subsidy, but it is, but you know, particularly with restaurants over there, you know, their their margins are so thin as it is that you know, if you want to eat there, you're gonna pay the price. Customers don't realize that.
SPEAKER_02They don't pay attention to what what what the what's the cost of doom businesses. They care about their pockets. Everyone's worried about their own pockets.
SPEAKER_00I saw a little shift during COVID. I mean, that's when cash discounting and surcharging kind of blew up was when restaurants are shutting down. I feel like people became aware, oh, hey, this is a thing. But, you know, the card brands' efforts to really snuff out awareness of this, you know, even in Congress, you know, there's two or three people up there talking about it, you know, then all of a sudden the big guy starts talking about it and it ruffles some feather for a minute, but then it just goes away. Because nobody understands this industry unless you've been in it for five years. Minimum. Five years. Right. Minimum. So when I go into a courtroom and I explain this and I draw it out, and I'm going, you know, here's the bank, here's the processor, here's the ISO, here's the sales guy. Everybody's making a little a little piece of this action, and guess who's paying for it? They're like, me. No, the merchant's paying for it. You're paying for nothing. And guess who gets all the profit? Is your bank who gave you the card? So they don't understand because, yeah, everybody thinks, you know, protect the consumer. Well, businesses are consumers. Protect the businesses, the merchants.
SPEAKER_01That's a great point, James. If
How Fees Worked Before Dual Pricing
SPEAKER_01I can pose a question really quick, gentlemen, and James, it's something I don't think on this podcast we've actually really ever covered. And I don't want to put you on the spot, but I'm curious if you know, what was credit card processing like before cash discounting, before dual pricing, or has it always been a thing?
SPEAKER_00No, it's not it, it wasn't a thing. It came out like the first people to be doing it. Clark, you can tell tell me if I'm wrong. I think it was around 2010 when 2007, 2008, when they started saying, hey, let's see if the consumer wants to pay for it, but it was not widely accepted. You know, people go by three.
SPEAKER_03I don't think they were calling it surcharge or cash discount, they were calling it like service fee.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, no, it wasn't it wasn't around. Um, I don't even know if you could do it on a Knuckle Buster. You'd have to just calculate that in.
SPEAKER_03Right. I mean, you could manually do it.
SPEAKER_02You can manually calculate it and put in that, put in the price.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I think there's always been service fees, you know, restaurants in particular, hotels, yeah, have always said, you know, service fee, this, that, the other thing. And then when these regulations came down, they really hammered it. And then the junk fee legislation doesn't quite get there. It does a little bit of just it has to be clear. Like if you're not telling people that you're charging them 5% or the first time it shows up is on the receipt, yeah, I think you're gonna be covered on that. But the you know, the junk fee where Ticketmaster is just gouging people doesn't really touch on this because it's a static fee that you know is disclosed, whereas a closed ticket master would vary from you know, minute to minute.
Where Pricing Communication Goes Next
SPEAKER_00So, where do you see this going, Clark? Where do you see uh surcharging and cash discounting going? Is it is it here to stay? Are they gonna adjust it? I think I think it would stay.
SPEAKER_02You know, the problem is uh technology improved in this industry, but pricing communication did not.
SPEAKER_03Right. That's no industry right now.
SPEAKER_02Education is horrible in this industry, it seems like it seems like they don't want to educate anyone on on what's going on in the industry with pricing, surcharging, cash discount. They don't want to educate anyone.
SPEAKER_00They'd rather give out the fines.
SPEAKER_02You know?
SPEAKER_00They'd rather give out the fines and have the banks keep making money. Wow. Well,
How To Reach Clark And Closing
SPEAKER_00Clark, you get last word. What do you want to what do you want to leave our viewers with? Listeners. Do do price a digital labeler.
SPEAKER_02That's what's going to be out there in the market.com.
SPEAKER_00All right, and then how do people get in touch with the other than the website?
SPEAKER_02Well, they can contact, they can contact the office directly, 917-808-5232, or they can send an email out to support at dupr ic e R dot com. Support at dualpricer.com. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01So thank you for listening this long to the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. We've had our special guest with us today, Clark Krimer from National EPayment. Go find Clark over at national epayment.com. And as always, James Huber joining us in the studio, managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm. Thank you, and we'll see you on the next one. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of Global Legal Law Firm. Visit us online today at Global Legal Law Firm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions that do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.