Interchange as a standalone might be low but scheme fees are about the same nowadays. Aydens provide a detail breakdown per transaction, for example on a UK consumer credit card there's sometimes 8 different line items (interchange, ayden markup, various scheme fees), one generally does not get out under 0.5% on interchange++ even in the UK on the most favourable cards. When you're on interchange pricing with either Stripe, Adyen or another big boy you're paying extra for AVS, 3DS, and several other scheme services. No one is walking away with 0.2% all in. A lot of people find these Visa and Mastercard published PDFs for interchange and think that's cheap, but reality is when the schemes got their nuts tightened on interchange fees they just spread the loss by marking up various scheme services and mandating them. John still want's his Avios points even in Europe/UK.

The gov.uk runs card transactions for dozens of services - which add up - from car tax, driver license renewal, passport replacements, to paying previous NI years (do you consider this tax?) and so on..

> Small beer anyway, it's not like people are paying taxes via card.

I do. If I’m going to give the government a big pile of money, I may as well earn some points for my trouble.

Why do you think that? People definitely pay taxes by card.

But regardless this contract is _not_ for HMRC payments, its for gov.uk pay which is basically a centralised service that other services can use.

Road fund licence aka car tax is probably the most common thing that lots of people pay for regularly.

And Companies House - still relatively rare though, like one payment of £50 per company per year.

Depends on the tax - I pay my vehicle tax through the gov.uk website!