(Finance) – The US payment giants Visa And MasterCard will extend for another five yearsuntil 2029, the commission caps for tourist cards agreed five years ago with EU antitrust authorities. The European Commission has announced.
On 29 April 2019, the Commission made the commitments offered by Mastercard and Visa legally binding under EU antitrust rules. The companies committed to significantly reduce (on average by about 40%) Multilateral interchange fees for payments in the European Economic Area with consumer cards issued elsewhere (interregional interchange fees). These commitments should be in place until November 2024.
The Commission takes note of the voluntary maintenance by Visa and Mastercard of caps for inter-regional interchange fees beyond November 2024. Inter-regional fees for debit and credit card transactions under these schemes will remain capped for another 5 years until November 2029. For card-present (offline) transactions, fees will remain capped at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. For card-not-present (online) transactions, the caps will remain at 1.15% for debit cards and 1.5% for credit cards.
“Mastercard and Visa debit and credit cards are still “indispensable” for traders of the EEA – reads a note – In the absence of limits, merchants would face the risk of excessive interchange fees being passed on to them through service fees”.
At this stage the Commission “there is no indication that the market has substantially changed and that the caps agreed in 2019 would no longer be appropriate.” However, the voluntary commitments by Visa and Mastercard do not prevent the Commission from conducting investigations or initiating proceedings if it obtains concrete evidence that the current caps would no longer be appropriate.
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