Australia's Reserve Bank Annual Report on Payment Systems
The Reserve Bank of Australia's Payments System Board has published its Annual Report (PDF) covering its activities for 2006 and 2007. The report devotes a full chapter to the Card Payments Systems - noting that "much of the Board’s effort has been devoted to improving efficiency and competition in Australia’s retail payments system, particularly the card-based systems" and, especially, interchange fees.
"The Board’s focus on these fees has reflected three interrelated factors. The first is that interchange fees can play an important role in influencing the prices that merchants and cardholders pay for payment services and, thus, they can affect the use of various payment methods. The second is that, historically, these fees have not been subject to the normal forces of competition. And the third is that the levels at which these fees had been set were not encouraging efficiency of the overall payments system; in particular, consumers were facing relatively high effective prices for using the payment systems with relatively low costs.
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