The European Parliament approved in March the regulation on capping interbank fees to 0.2% for debit card payments and 0.3% for credit card payments, which will come into effect at the end of the year.
“The impact for banks is a universal one, each issuer bank was getting revenues from this fee, which will be cut fivefold. On the backdrop of this sharp revenue fall, for large lenders (…), revenues will be offset, while small banks (…) will find themselves in a delicate position and many of them will no longer find the motivation to support this segment, affecting the size and volume of the market,” Catalin Cretu, regional manager of Visa Europe for Romania, Croatia and Slovenia, said in a press conference.
In his turn, Septimiu Tulpan, head of Card Committee with the Romanian Banking Association (ARB), considers that the difference of revenue will be, in the end, supported by the client.
As a solution, banks will have the option to provide simple and cheap products, without benefits, or complex products at higher costs, otherwise they will increase other fees to cover the revenues, Cretu said.
On the other hand, retailers will be advantaged by the measure, as they will gain EUR6 billion at European level, and said they will promote and encourage card payments, while part of the cost cut will positively impact the shelf price.
Nevertheless, Cretu is skeptical that product prices will decrease.
MasterCard Romania general manager, Cosmin Vladimirescu, said that electronic payment systems will take the economy out of the “black hole”, but the sums of money saved by retailers by cutting interbank fees are too low to be transferred to consumers.
According to central bank data, there are 14.1 million active cards in Romania, a level which remained stable in the last two years.