Australia's surcharging shambles
In the latest of multiple reviews of payments and surcharging in Australia, industry seems to have only one view in common: it's a mess.
No matter which side of the debate over surcharging one falls on, there is broad agreement that the current situation is a mess.
“You wouldn’t start from here” best sums up what the Reserve Bank is hearing on surcharging on digital and card payments as the deadline looms for submissions to its Review of Retail Payments Regulation. And Treasurer Jim Chalmers' plan to just ban surcharges on debit transactions has only confused things further.
The RBA is in a faintly invidious position, because two decades ago it was the first regulator to intervene in the fee-setting for what was then largely the credit card market. At the same time, it introduced surcharging by overriding Visa and Mastercard bans on the practice.
Moreover, current governor Michele Bullock was either chief manager or head of payments policy at the central bank in the critical years from 1998 to 2007.
