Plain answers about debit card program performance, from PDEX — Payment Data Exchange, an independent debit analytics practice for community banks. Every figure below is cited to a public source. None of it is a projection.
How do I know if my bank's debit card program is performing well?
It is often difficult to tell from standard bank reporting alone. The UBPR provides extensive peer comparisons for the institution, but it does not break the debit-card program out as its own performance line. The Uniform Bank Performance Report (UBPR), a standard federal peer-comparison report, breaks noninterest income into defined categories — income from fiduciary activities; service charges on deposit accounts; trading revenue plus venture capital revenue plus securitization income; investment banking, advisory, underwriting, brokerage fees and commissions; insurance commissions and fees; net servicing fees; net gains (losses) on sales of loans; net gains (losses) on sale of other real estate owned plus net gains on sale of other assets; and "other noninterest income." Debit interchange and ATM fees land in that last, unbroken-out bucket. There is no peer ratio for the card program, no trend line, and nothing for a director to compare against anything.
The result is that debit often lacks the independent performance measurement applied to other important lines of business. PDEX starts by calculating the bank's own observed measures and setting them beside published references.
Source: FFIEC UBPR User's Guide, "Noninterest Income and Expenses — Page 3."
What does a community bank typically earn on debit interchange?
Two useful published references measure different parts of the picture.
The Federal Reserve publishes average debit interchange by network under Regulation II. For exempt issuers — banks under $10 billion in assets, which is nearly every community bank — the 2024 averages were 1.41% of transaction value ($0.61 per transaction) on dual-message ("signature") networks and 0.67% ($0.26 per transaction) on single-message ("PIN") networks. Among the major networks, exempt averages run roughly 0.5% to 1.5% of transaction value.
The PULSE Debit Issuer Study (2025 edition, 2024 data) reports what issuers actually realized across their whole mix: exempt issuers averaged 46.0 cents of interchange per transaction, or about $164 per active debit card per year.
Neither number is your number. Your program's blended yield depends on its mix — signature versus PIN, business versus consumer, card-present versus card-not-present — which is exactly why measuring it is worth doing.
Sources: Federal Reserve, "Average Debit Card Interchange Fee by Payment Card Network," 2024 data; PULSE 2025 Debit Issuer Study.
Is business debit really worth more than consumer debit?
At exempt banks, substantially. On Visa's published U.S. interchange schedule (effective April 18, 2026), a standard card-present retail purchase carries 0.80% plus $0.15 on exempt consumer debit and 1.70% plus $0.10 on exempt business debit — on a $100 purchase, 95 cents versus $1.80. In realized terms, the PULSE study reports exempt issuers averaging $1.64 per business debit transaction. Those are schedule and survey figures, not any single bank's results — but the direction is not subtle, and it is why the debit card attached to a commercial operating account deserves more attention than it usually gets.
Sources: Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fees, effective April 18, 2026; PULSE 2025 Debit Issuer Study.
Do other banks actually know their numbers?
Mostly not, by the industry's own account. The 2025 PULSE Debit Issuer Study — a survey of 49 U.S. banks and credit unions — reports that "only about half are confident in their understanding of their debit program's interchange revenue." Not knowing is the norm, not the exception.
Source: PULSE 2025 Debit Issuer Study, p. 10.
What data would we need to analyze our program — do we have to build custom reports?
No. A real analysis runs on files the bank already has or can request once. Most of it is already in the building: the monthly interchange income summaries and network settlement statements that arrive from the processor whether anyone asks or not, the bank's own fraud log, and reference documents like the processor fee schedule. Card-level detail — one row per card, one row per card per month, and declined-authorization detail with reason codes — comes from the processor's systems, either through the bank's own portal access or as one bundled request to the processor, specified field by field, submitted once. Nobody at the bank builds anything, and PDEX receives no direct customer identifiers — no names, no account numbers, and no card numbers. Card-level extracts carry a pseudonymous card identifier only.
Can't our processor just tell us how we're doing?
Your processor is an essential operating partner — this is not a knock on them. But the processor shouldn't have to be the bank's only source of performance measurement. Those are two different roles, and nobody inside one book of business can tell you how you compare outside it. The same logic your bank applies everywhere else — the auditor doesn't audit their own work — applies to a revenue line that runs through a single vendor.
What is PDEX?
PDEX (Payment Data Exchange) is an independent debit-card analytics practice for community banks, based in Tulsa, OK, founded and run by Brian McDaniel. Independence is structural: PDEX charges flat fees only and is never paid a percentage of anything it measures. For bank analytics engagements, PDEX is paid solely by the bank and receives no compensation from processors, networks, or other vendors. Engagements start with a no-charge first read of whatever reporting the bank already receives — what's measurable from it, what isn't, and where the program sits against the published figures above. Every number PDEX reports is either the bank's own or cited to a public source, and the method is documented so the bank's own analyst can re-run it and land on the same result. That is what independent measurement means.
Contact: info@pdex.com — or start with a 20-minute conversation.