What is a "large company" in this context? My employer is on track to run about $5m through Stripe this year, which will be our fourth full year using Stripe. Our first year we did about $2.75m. This year I've been getting occasional emails from a Stripe sales rep for the first time, which suggests that we've crossed some sort of threshold...
Your stripe transaction cost is probably around the advertised fee, 2.9% + 30¢
With an actual merchant account you can probably get closer to 2% or at least 2.5% + 25-30¢
At 5 million in transaction revenue, a .5% decrease would be 25k a year. You can probably get a larger decrease depending on how much risk your company's business has.
Stripe's sales rep might be contacting your company because you've hit the threshold where it's probably worth getting a merchant account, and they want to see if you're considering leaving to give you a discounted rate to stay. You're pretty much in Stripe's retention department because of your volume. It is definitely worthwhile at this point for your company to shop around for a merchant account. Some don't even have application fees if you're not a high risk business. At the least they can get an idea of how much they could save, and use that to leverage lower fees from Stripe.
I would still consider trying for a processing gateway that handles all the card transmission, though, even at a slightly higher margin. Handling the card at all means you need PCI Compliance. At your revenue you're probably PCI Level 2 or 3, which only requires a self-assessment questionnaire (that is lengthy but doable), and a quarterly vulnerability scan. At 6 Million transactions a year, you'll be PCI Level 1, which means you'll need an auditor to come in and look at your processes and policies.
Stripe will offer interchange plus model so you are actually paying the real interchange rate + whatever they tack on for settlement probably 25 basis points and some fixed rate of 0.05 a transaction. You shouldn’t be paying a blended rate if you’re doing significant volume.
If you’re using a gateway, there are some that Handle tokenization so you never have to touch the PANs and you don’t have to worry about PCI levels and audits. There’s no reason your systems should be touching PANs unless you’re really large and using multiple payment processors for scalability and redundancy like if you need to process a million transactions in a few hours.
