Payment News

Auditor Raises Concerns Over EU Interchange Interventions

In a special report 01/2025, ‘Digital payments in the EU’ (European Union), the European Court of Auditors says that EU’s approach to digital payments has helped to make them ‘safer, faster and cheaper for users’.

But it then raises concerns about the EU’s approach to price interventions for the interchange fee cap for card payments and the surcharge ban on card and Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) payments.

The auditor found:

• The basic legal acts on digital payments do not stipulate clear criteria for assessing whether price interventions are justified, or how long they should apply.
• There are also no requirements for periodic reviews.
• For some of the interventions linked to card payments, the European Commission could not demonstrate that the positive effects for consumers clearly outweigh the negative ones, because it does not have effective monitoring systems and lacks access to the relevant data. As a result, the impact of the EU’s digital-payment policies remains largely unknown.