See the website of the British Retail Consortium to read that Mastercard planned for a new approach to debit card interchange charging but was stopped by retailers...
In the UK retailers currently pay a fixed fee on debit card transactions regardless of the value of the transaction. Rates range from 6 pence to 18 pence, depending on which card it is and where and how the transaction occurs, but the fee on a £20 transaction is the same as for a £100 transaction.
For this new debit card MasterCard wanted to introduce percentage, or so-called ad valorem, fees. It wanted to charge a fixed fee of 3.5 pence plus 0.15 per cent of the purchase price.
It's intruiging: the attempts of debit card schemes to go for the ad valorem fee structures for payments where actual value (in terms of cost) does not influence the cost of the transaction....
