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Why are they paying 6.4% on processing fees? What is "movement support" and where is the travel to? Do they have to publicly disclose these disbursements anywhere? This seems sketchy at best.


‘Processing fees’ likely includes the cost of administering the CRM, creating tax receipts and reports, donor support, and all the other ‘processing’ tasks that come with running a large fundraising effort. It wouldn’t just be the credit card fees.


Wikipedia is full of the kind of stuff mainstream payment processors balk at, so they might have to use a higher risk processor with higher fees.


Easily Checked:

Wikimedia accepts Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Check, ACH and Money Order.

Pretty hard to argue that mainstream processors don't like them.

Processors charge higher fees to merchants that are in lines of business with high fraud and chargeback risk, has nothing to do with whether they agree with them morally.

They refuse merchants with business they don't like.

If it were the case that processors didn't like what wikipedia publishes, they would not be able to accept payment, not have high fees.

I can't imagine that wikipedia has high chargeback rates, and clearly the processors don't mind doing business with them.

The processing line item probably includes not just the fees that they have to pay to processors, but FX fees, the cost of banking, the cost of paying people to open envelopes, the cost of accounting, etc.


> I can't imagine that wikipedia has high chargeback rates, and clearly the processors don't mind doing business with them.

Its actually somewhat common for people who steal credit cards to use non profits like wikipedia to "test" them. Typically such sites have no minimum donation, have donations from all over the world so fraud detection wont think its weird you're spending money half way across the world.


Check the source on the donation page. It looks like they actually use something called Gr4vy above all that to handle payments.

https://gr4vy.com

Using a platform with its own fee on top of payment processor fees would explain the 6.4%.


Don't you think their brand recognition would be an easy way around that?


No. Why would a payment processor make an exception to its risk-based rules for an organization that increases exposure to that risk? Brand recognition is a liability in this case.




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