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Antitrust accusations lobbed this week against Visa Europe provide further evidence of the demise of interchange, a leading European merchant group said Tuesday. On Monday, the European Commission said Visa Europe restricted competition between banks with its cross-border interchange rates. "The commission's action is a further sign that the interchange fee has had its day," Xavier Durieu, secretary general of EuroCommerce, a merchant lobbying group based in Brussels, says in a statement. The group, which opposes what it says are high card-acceptance costs for businesses, prefers a fixed-rate pricing scheme for card transactions. The group recently renewed its advocacy of a European debit card that charges 1 euro cent per transaction instead of a percentage of the transaction (CardLine Global, 1 April). The commission's charge against Visa Europe came less than a week after MasterCard Worldwide said it would slash its cross-border debit and credit card interchange rates, a move that gained the commission's approval. MasterCard suspended those rates in June after a December 2007 ruling from the commission that those rates, commonly known as "multilateral interchange fees," violated European Union competition rules. MasterCard has appealed the ruling to the European Court of First Instance.
