Coming into force last week, the governments Retail Payment System Bill has brought in a number of changes in an effort to reduce merchant services fees for both businesses and consumers.
The Retail Payment System Bill, will address merchant service fees by:
- Setting limits on interchange fees – the largest component of merchant service fees
- Enabling the Commerce Commission to monitor the retail payment system and directly intervene to regulate designated networks
- Empowering the Commerce Commission to ensure any surcharging by merchants is reasonable.
More importantly for our customers however, merchants who apply, or wish to apply, a surcharge on credit card transactions, must only apply a surcharge to a maximum of the merchant services fee charged by their bank.
For example, this means that if your merchant services fee (MSF) from your bank was 2.00%, you are no longer legally permitted to enforce a surcharge over 2.00%.
Questions? Give our friendly team a call on 03 688 6636 to discuss and/or change your surcharge setup on your terminal.