For banks under $10B in assets, business debit interchange averages $1.64 per transaction (PULSE Debit Issuer Study, 2024 data) — more than five times what the largest banks are allowed to earn on the same purchase, because exempt issuers sit outside the Durbin cap.
Run the math on one relationship, at that published average: a commercial customer putting 100 transactions a month on a business debit card would generate about $164 a month in interchange. Nearly $2,000 a year. From one account. That is an industry average, not any one bank's rate — what a program actually earns depends on its own mix.
And yet at most community banks:
- Business debit is a checkbox at account opening, not a program
- Nobody tracks how many commercial deposit relationships actually carry an active card
- The highest-rate card in the portfolio gets the least attention
Here's the question worth asking your team Monday morning: what share of our business checking accounts have an active debit card attached — and who owns that number?
If nobody owns it, it's probably low. And unlike most revenue ideas, fixing this one requires no new system, no conversion, and no vendor. Just measurement, and then intention.
Source: 2025 PULSE Debit Issuer Study (20th edition; 2024 data), p. 10 — exempt-issuer business debit interchange $1.64 per transaction versus 28.8¢ for covered issuers.
Originally posted on LinkedIn, August 7, 2026.