Banks join scrap over surcharging
Are small merchants cross subsidising large ones for digital payment costs? Who should pay for cash? Who's making money from surcharging? The payments debate is heating up.
The payments system has emerged as an unlikely regulatory battleground for Australia's biggest banks, with an increasingly heated debate over surcharges and the true costs of cash now dominating industry discussions.
That much was clear following last week's grilling of the big bank bosses in parliament where the normally arcane payments system arguably overshadowed ANZ's ongoing scandals and the common lament of price gouging.
Labor MP Jerome Laxale was adamant that card providers, the banks, and merchant and technology providers are “having a laugh here, scraping $4 billion off our bank accounts to provide an essential service that costs less to operate and maintain than its free, non-digital alternative”.
The payments system is not something most people think about in their day-to-day lives — unless it doesn’t work, or the cost of using a digital payment hits the back pocket.
