Australia's regulator has now told the card networks to make their network fees easier to understand and check. The reasons will sound familiar to anyone who manages a network fee invoice, in any market.
In its review of card payment costs, the Reserve Bank of Australia found that many issuers and payment providers struggle to estimate and reconcile their network fees (also known as scheme fees). Some don't check whether they're billed correctly at all. They only look into it when fees cross a set threshold, because it's cheaper to absorb the errors than to chase them.
So the RBA now expects the networks, including Visa and Mastercard, to publish a Scheme Fee Roadmap by April 1, 2027, showing how they will:
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Label each fee as mandatory, optional or behavioral
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Explain how to avoid optional fees, with simple opt-out procedures
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Give at least six months' notice of fee changes
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Provide machine-readable invoices and on-demand billing reports at no extra cost
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Notify everyone affected by a billing error and fix it for all of them
None of these issues are unique to Australia. They're the same ones we see across the markets we work in: optional services that are still switched on, behavioral fees that could be avoided with a process change, and billing errors that go unnoticed because the invoice is too complex to check.
Practically speaking, you don't need to wait for a roadmap. Most of this can be worked through today with the invoices you already receive, and we typically see 7 to 15% of network fees that can be reduced. The harder part is keeping it there as fees, rules and invoices keep changing, and we have tools to manage that on an ongoing basis. DM me if you want to learn more.
Part 4 of a short series on what Australia's new network fee rules and data show.