Moving money is expensive, but your average $1 bill is the worst example for cold cash and if my memory serves those cost 4 cents each to make, and generally circulate at high velocity, getting yanked in just under 2 years and changing hands about 30 or 40 times in their lifetime, so presumably the hidden printing fee is about .1% every time you use one, that's not very high and it is the worst offender compared to long-lived coinage or higher denomination bills. But you also have physical security costs, ATMs, vaults, armored cars - not too mention handling, a bit absurd but it obviously takes less time to do a debit swipe then pay an $79.93 tab with one dollar bills, we don't pay retail cashiers a lot of money but just to use a round number if it costs a company $12 an hour to keep a cashier on they'd be paying 20 cents a minute so a $.56 transaction cost isn't ludicrously out of the ballpark. If the primary goal is to keep the velocity on the money high then that really comes down to the consumer's feeling of convenience, and if that $.44 difference gets passed on to consumer directly instead of indirectly it might do more harm than good, and I really doubt VISA and MS are actually pocketing the implied ~500% profit that a .56->.12 price change indicates, so it will get passed on somewhere and if not to consumers directly then presumably some other sector of the economy would be in for Tyson-esque knockout punch.

I don't know, I'd want more information before making my mind up on this one - like an actual third-party verification VISA and MC's total cost to run these networks.