The European Commission is set to propose a cap on credit card swipe fees which will save billions of euros to the consumers, The Financial Times says. The banks and payment systems, in their turns, will suffer equal losses.
Brussels aims to restrict interchange fees to 0.2% on debit and 0.3% on credit cards. Initially, the novelty will come in for cross-board operations. However, the regulation will be phased in over two years for the rest of the transactions. As the result, the EU banks will lose about 2.3 billion euros on debit and 2.2 billion euros on credit cards.
Now the dispersion on commissions in the EU countries differs from 0.1% on debit cards in Denmark to up to 1.8% on credit cards in Germany. The French banks charge 0.5% from every transaction made with the credit card.
In 2011, the EU issued 727 million of bank cards. The total volume of transactions equaled 1.9 trillion euros. Taking the leading market niches, Visa and MasterCard hold 42% and 49% correspondingly. The banks benefit about 13 billion euros annually from transaction commissions.
The European Commission plans to limit the fees on banking card transactions in 10 years. Several antitrust cases were initiated until now; however, no decisions were made.
