Court Rules On Domestic Interchange Fees

Originally published June 16 2005

The Court for the Defence of Competition has issued two decisions rejecting applications submitted by two card payment system associations (Sistema 4B and Servired) to obtain individual exemptions for their respective agreements on intra-system interchange fees (ie, fees applied to domestic consumer card transactions in retail outlets when the acquirer's and the merchant's banks are members of the same card payment system association).

The court issued another decision ordering the Service for the Defence of Competition to conduct proceedings aimed at amending or removing the individual exemption which had been granted to a third payment system association (Euro 6000) in 2001.