MasterCard and Visa probably won't be entertaining lengthy thoughts of an appeal over the Federal Court's decision on Friday to dismiss the application by the card schemes to overturn the Reserve Bank of Australia's regulation of the credit card market.This banking newsletter is published by a bush lawyer, but a reading of Brian Tamberlin's 96,000 word judgement (so make that a speed read with skimming) shows that the court demolished every line of argument advanced by the two card schemes.The court in fact found that the card schemes resorted to artificial arguments in an effort to construct a narrow definition of payments systems, and so knock out the Reserve Bank regulations. The card companies had hoped to derail the regulations on technical grounds that their payments system was not, in fact, a payments system, but rather an interconnected series or rights and obligations. In particular, they'd argued that the transfer of funds only took affect when funds were cleared a net basis each day through the Reserve Bank's exchange settlement account, and outside the reach of the Reserve Bank's powers under the Payment System (Regulation) Act. The applicants mounted various administrative law arguments, mainly to do with process, as well.Visa managed to persuade the court on one, narrow aspect; which was that there was no transfer of money at the point in time at which the card holder enters into a purchase with a merchant.But aside from that technical point, the court ruled that the obvious is, well, obvious, and that the sequence of steps which follows presenting a credit card at the checkout "initiates the whole systemic process".If MasterCard and Visa do have grounds to overturn the Federal Court's decision, its likely to be a challenge based on narrow debates of statutory construction of the law, and in particular the critical debate about what constitutes a payments system.Among Brian Tamberlin's observations in his judgement on this issue:• "The rules, regulations and procedures governing the [Visa and MasterCard] systems are an integrated whole. They are not drawn up and do not operate as discrete, severable and unrelated parts Â… [but] operate in unison in an integrated way and there is no basis to isolate particular sections."• "The procedures envisage the use of a national central bank and of local settlement banks which operate through local clearing systems Â… as a consequence of procedures followed at earlier stages. They are therefore dependent on those stages."• "The purpose of the Visa and MasterCard systems is that, according to their rules, and in the normal course, once the initial purchase transaction is made, the rest of the procedures resulting in transfer of funds inexorably follow as a consequence of the rules and regulations from the underlying transaction at the merchant customer level."• "The suggested separation of the lower and upper levels of the system has a strong flavour of artificiality and that indicates that the submission was custom made to avoid the consequences of the standards and access regimes." • "[I am] not