I've had a few changes of office since I set up as an independent banking journalist. Only one set of printed banking documents has survived the successive culls.'Debit and Credit Card Schemes in Australia, A Study of Interchange Fees' is the first of a key set.This 15 year old "joint study," as it became known, is the primary work in a series of reformist tomes authored or supported by the Reserve Bank of Australia.The work was the culmination of a deepening interest by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, first, and the Reserve Bank of Australia, second, in questions of industry structure and consumer protection in payments.This pair of regulators took on a shared responsibility and laid down a path to a worthwhile niche of microeconomic reform.Released in October 2000, this study gradually unleashed the RBA cop on a new beat. Its task: challenging banking business models in payments. Armed with Wallis-inspired powers on payments several years earlier, the central bank took time to consider and share its thinking, with the ultimate result a lively foray as enforcer.But the final social purpose was never that clearly explained.No actual bank robbers were ever cornered by Australia's Payments System Board, and the PSB's main win was a form of opening up of access to the system.The joint study concluded that: "the interests of end-users of card payments services need to be more directly engaged in the pricing process and conditions of entry to card payment networks."The score on the latter is fair - any outfit with the capital and nous to be taken seriously is able to queue up for entry, as several have.Tellingly, after the Tyro Payments the entry list of new names is thin. Woolworths, dabbling again, is one.Interchange rates on credit cards in Australia have found their way down in the period since the study.Interchange fees were 0.95 per cent on average at the time of the study.MasterCard in early November 2015 set its consumer standard rate at 32 basis points.For strategic merchants, meaning supermarkets and Bunnings, interchange fees at MasterCard are 25 bps.Visa set a lower standard rate of 27.5 bps with scope to charge more or less for the biggest customers than MasterCard.Merchant service fees on average were 1.78 per cent at the time of the study. The most recent RBA data has them at 0.82 per cent.So acquiring banks now pay away one third of the merchant fee as interchange in the case of Visa. It used to be 53 per cent.The RBA fired the opening salvo of a lawful assailment of Australia's free market in payments in December 2001.Reform of Credit Card Schemes, a three volume set, guards its place on my shelf more effectively than the RBA has the interests of consumers.