Amex fires back at rival schemes
Individual scheme shares of the credit and debit card sectors should be published by the Reserve Bank of Australia, American Express has proposed in a second submission to the Financial System Inquiry.At present the RBA publishes a combined market share estimate - now around 81 per cent - for MasterCard and Visa.Amex also want intervention to compel acquiring banks to "provide merchants with more information about interchange fees passed through to them, so that merchants can better understand their costs of accepting different cards."The payments company prepared the second submission in response to what it describes as "factually inaccurate claims being made about our business by Visa and MasterCard," in their submissions to the inquiry.According to Amex, "Visa and MasterCard made submissions to the Financial System Inquiry with a single-minded objective: they call for American Express and others to be subject to further regulation under the Reserve Bank's payment systems regime, for their own competitive benefit."Amex asserted that its two rivals "manipulated publicly-available share data to exaggerate the gains of American Express and Diners Club, whilst ignoring the inconvenient fact that their own anti-competitive conduct had caused them to be regulated in the first place," in 2003, with controls on interchange fees.Amex noted the irony that Visa and MasterCard now want a public sector agency to enforce limits on credit card surcharging - "using public resources to make a breach of their private rules into a crime."