Global: Visa and Mastercard Extend Non-EU Card Fee Caps to 2029, EU Announces

Visa and Mastercard have agreed to extend the fee caps on tourist card transactions initially established with EU antitrust regulators in 2019. These caps will now remain in place until 2029, the European Commission announced on Friday.

In 2019, Visa, the world’s largest payments network, and its main competitor Mastercard, agreed to a 0.2% fee cap on non-EU debit card payments in stores and a 0.3% fee cap on credit card payments. This agreement came as a resolution to an EU antitrust investigation, allowing the companies to avoid substantial fines.

The current fee caps were set to expire in November this year. This decision followed a prolonged investigation by the EU competition authority, which began after a 1997 complaint from business lobby group EuroCommerce.

The European Commission, which oversees antitrust enforcement in the EU, stated that both companies volunteered to extend the fee caps beyond 2024.

“Inter-regional interchange fees for debit and credit card transactions under these schemes will remain capped for another five years until November 2029,” the Commission said in a statement. “For card-present (offline) transactions, the fees will remain capped at 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. For card-not-present (online) transactions, the caps will remain at 1.15% for debit cards and 1.5% for credit cards.”

Visa highlighted that extending the fee caps provides market certainty regarding inter-regional interchange rates. “The commitments agreed with the EC in 2019, and this new undertaking, recognize that cross-border e-commerce transactions are fundamentally different from in-store payments,” the company noted in an email.

Visa and Mastercard set and charge interchange fees, also known as swipe fees, to merchants that accept their debit and credit cards. These fees generate profits for banks and other card issuers.

The European Commission, however, warned that it would launch an investigation if concrete evidence emerges showing that the current fee caps are no longer appropriate.