Merchants call on EU institutions to cap commercial cards interchange

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, such as between travel intermediaries and hotels and/or airlines, or to use commercial cards as the basis for meal and social vouchers. 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.

Impact: price discrimination

Merchants with a high share – can be as high as 60-70% - of business customers (e.g. wholesalers, airlines, service stations, hotels), pay higher fees for the same payment services compared to merchants that mostly have private citizens (consumers) as customer

Surcharging or non-acceptance of commercial cards are not remedies, it’s fighting symptoms:

• The IFR allows merchants to either surcharge or non-accept commercial cards. In reality neither are a viable option, because merchants cannot easily detect that a customer uses a commercial card. Tokenisation of cards makes that increasingly hard. Even if the card number is not tokenised, merchants rarely know which card ranges (using the BIN) are used for commercial cards, because that information is not publicly available. And would need to invest in their technical infrastructure to manage BIN-ranges and check each cards against them.
• Even if a commercial card can be detected, surcharging and non-acceptance can cause significant friction at check-out: if they are not used to it, customers and cashiers will not understand why commercial cards are treated differently from consumer cards and customers might not have an alternative ‘business’ payment option available.
• 16 out of 27 member states have imposed a complete surcharging ban: surcharging for commercial cards is not allowed. In those cases, customers using consumer cards are unknowingly subsidising those that use commercial cards.

Cure the root cause: stop price discrimination – our call on the EU institutions:

• Include commercial cards in the scope of interchange fee caps by deleting IFR Article 1.3 (a), because the same anti-trust arguments that led to the consumer interchange fee caps applied then and still apply to commercial cards. Interchange for commercial cards should have been capped too at the time.
• 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.