Don't touch my Interchange revenues and model!

The Payment Networks and their "members" the issuers are actively trying to protect their model and their revenues. The battle is really a North American one where revenues are largely coming from Interchange. In Europe the capping of Interchange offers a better balance relation between the Acquiring and Issuing actors. EU Merchants are in a much better position with card acceptance cost being very low.

The US market Interchange model promotes the development of alternative payment acceptance schemes to try to protect Merchants against high Interchange fees... ISIS, MCX, as well as the Debit Network routing practices are some of these solutions. The challenge is that the emergence of these new schemes introduces even more complexity in the payment acceptance domain for both merchants and cardholder…

NFC payment acceptance is another element that would need to be fixed. Payment Networks have decided to compete on the technical level by having specific card processing and related acquirer integration certifications (PayPass, payWave, ExpressPay, ZIP-DPAS, etc…) that impose complementary and unexpected costs to Merchants whishing to support EMV and NFC.

In many ways the industry is missing a global organization managing chip based payment acceptance, and working in better relation with the merchants and acceptance solution providers that the Payment Networks are currently. They promote EMV and NFC but are not capable of collaborating to reduce implementation costs, and are imposing ever higher constraints on Merchants.

This is not how Payment Networks are going to protect their role in the Ecosystem. They may even be the problem in the payment ecosystem!...