Yesterdays Financieele Dagblad reports that ING loses its contract for POS-debit transaction for Ahold to ABN AMRO. This accounts for about 10 % (125 million) transactions for the big retailer (Albert Heijn) but may account for 300 million transactions if we include other companies within the Ahold-form (Etos, Gall&Gall, ..). Rumour has it that the price of the transaction will be 2,5 eurocents per transaction. But non one kwows really, now that banks all compete for the retailers.
Of course the representative organisations of small retailers are silent while all this happens. Because they may have not done their constituency such a favour by demanding the split up of the acquiring-monopoly for POS (which resided at Interpay). By forcing all retailers to contract with the individual bank, the larger retailers can of course negotiate their lower prices while small retailers get stuck without purchasing power.
But small retailers can't and lose the benefit of the so-called 'scale-efficiency' of Interpay prices. This scale-efficieny meant that at the end of the year -depending of the total number of POS-autoristions (small and big retailers added)- they would get a discount on transaction fee. To my knowledge, neither central bank nor competition authority nor the small retailer organisations foresaw this effect.
