The Impact of Interchange Fees on Merchants and Consumers

This paper explores the issue of the multilateral interchange fees from the perspective of the competition law. The multilateral interchange fees are payments for card transactions operated through financial institutions such as Visa and MasterCard. The issue raised by the European Commission is how these fees can affect the competition, the retailers and the consumers in the European Union. For a modern, functional and efficient European retail payment market is important to monitor how the law is applied and respected to assure the transparency and clarity regarding the ratio between real costs and benefits of different payment instruments. Therefore, the procedure used to set the interchange fees should promote economic efficiency and compliance with the competition law