A processor laughed off Suneera Madhani's flat-fee idea. She and her brother built it anyway, reached a $1 billion valuation, and then discovered the bigger business was not one clever price - it was owning more of the machinery behind every swipe.

The former bond investor now runs InterPayments, where the visible fee is merely the tip of an iceberg made of card rules, state laws and customer psychology.
InterPayments is a San Francisco-based fintech that runs surcharging as a managed service. Merchants who accept credit cards get hit with interchange fees; passing those fees back to customers is legal in most of the US and Canada but governed by a patchwork of 70+ jurisdictions and card-network rules. InterPayments handles the calculation, application, and reporting of compliant surcharges, and contractually indemnifies its clients against penalties. It sells through embedded products (PayLink virtual terminal, hosted payment pages), an API, and integrations with platforms like NetSuite and Stripe, serving Fortune 1000 merchants, major banks, and payment processors.