Uncapped fees lead to price discrimination and inflated consumer prices and are costing the EU economy at least € 4bn per year.
The 2015 Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) capped interchange fees for consumer cards at 0,2% and 0,3% for debit and credit cards respectively. Commercial cards, sometimes called corporate, business or company cards, were excluded and for those interchange fees remained uncapped ranging between 1,3 and 2,4%, up to 6 times higher than for consumer cards. However, because it is nearly impossible for merchants to identify commercial cards, merchants cannot avoid paying these higher fees that ultimately lead to higher prices for their products and services, adding to inflation.
These higher fees for commercial cards translate to higher sales prices for B2B customers because higher costs will be reflected in higher prices to EU citizens even though citizens don’t use commercial cards.
What happened since IFR?
The transaction share of commercial cards grew from 3% to around 4% and from 7% to 8% share of value. The value share is higher due to the higher average transaction value. If the U.S. is any indication: commercial cards may increase to a transaction share of 7.5% with some 18% of value. Attracted by the significantly higher interchange, issuers are pushing for commercial cards propositions e.g. to use them cards for Business-to-Business (B2B) payments instead of SEPA credit transfers.
The absolute volume and value of commercial cards have grown parallel with the growth of the overall cards volume and value, with the relative share staying roughly the same. On top of that, commercial cards’ interchange fees have increased because Mastercard and Visa try to out-compete each other (‘reverse competition’) for issuer preference. For merchants the same ‘abuse of a dominant position’ arguments apply to commercial cards, justifying intervention as has happened for consumer cards under IFR.
Using ECB payment statistics, we calculate that European merchants have paid at least EUR 4 bn ‘too much’ in 2025, compared to if commercial card fees would have been capped at IFR rates.
We call on the EU institutions to:
- Include commercial cards in the scope of interchange fee caps by deleting IFR Article 1.3 (a).
- Protect EU businesses and citizens from undue price discrimination, an unlevel playing field and barriers to “One Europe, One Market”, that eventually could lead to inflated consumer prices.
Read the joint paper of the Merchant Payments Coalition Europe here.