Network rules

Interchange fees are a major part of the costs merchants pay to accept payment cards. While merchants seek relief from fees during a time in which their businesses face serious damage from stay-at-home edicts because of coronavirus, the credit card companies and banks quickly began to dig in their heels.

While much of the world is sheltering at home to deter the spread of coronavirus, there's still a need for essential workers to travel — and an opportunity for the development of in-car payments technology, which could allow consumers to pay for gas or food without handling cash or other potentially infected surfaces.

With coronavirus driving more merchants to promote electronic payments over cash — and contactless payments over cards — many are still asking their customers to share a potentially virus-laden pen to sign a receipt or screen at the point of sale.

With coronavirus presenting significant challenges for retailers and the technical challenges of imposing interchange fee changes in the networks, Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover are holding off on the updates.

It's still unclear how the coronavirus pandemic will alter payment habits over time — will consumers avoid cash out of fear of germs, or will they favor it as the one payment option that nearly all merchants accept? An impending change in interchange rates may tip the scales in cash's favor.

The decisions made five years ago are creating problems for contactless payments today.

Barclays, which processes nearly half the U.K.’s credit and debit card transactions, has signed a multi-year partnership that extends its 50-year relationship with Visa.

Visa typically adjusts its interchange rates every April and October, but this year it is getting an atypically strong response.

Since the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard was introduced in 2004, many merchants found compliance to be too arduous or costly and just skipped it, risking fines. But increasingly, other regulations like GDPR are changing the PCI DSS compliance equation.

In a move to increase the attractiveness of its Real-Time Payment (RTP) network, The Clearing House is raising the transactional limit for single payments to $100,000 starting February 1, 2020.