MasterCard meets commitment to lower credit-card payment tariffs

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has established that MasterCard has met its commitment of gradually lowering the tariffs that banks charge each other for processing domestic credit-card payments. ACM had previously expressed its concerns about the level of these interchange fees.

As a result of this tariff reduction, market participants that process transactions of retailers save over EUR 10 million on payments with MasterCard creditcards. Business owners and consumers in the Netherlands will eventually benefit from this tariff reduction for payment transactions.

In 2014, the average tariff was 0.9 percent per transaction. At the time, it was agreed that MasterCard would lower this average to 0.7 percent between June and December 2014, followed by a further reduction to 0.5 percent in 2015. ACM was able to establish only recently that MasterCard has met its promises for 2014 and 2015, as ACM had to analyze the averages.

When MasterCard promised to lower its tariffs gradually, the company was ahead of European regulations for interchange fees of credit-card payments that came into force in December 2015. In the Netherlands, regulations are currently being drafted that will charge ACM with oversight of these interchange fees.