Fat surcharges on credit card payments may remain a feature of the payments landscape under revised rules released yesterday by the Reserve Bank of Australia.The guidance note from the RBA supplements the updated regulation published in the middle of the year.The updated regulation gives credit card schemes the power to sanction banks that tolerate excessive surcharging by merchants on purchases made with credit cards (including scheme debit cards). It takes effect from the beginning of 2012.In the new guidance note, the RBA reiterated that the standard "allow[s] the card schemes to limit surcharges to 'the reasonable cost of acceptance', which includes, but is not limited to, the merchant service fee."Other "additional costs" that the RBA considers reasonable include "costs payable to other payment service providers and the "merchants' own costs related to card acceptance".The high-profile classes of merchant affected by the shift in policy include taxi payment processors. These companies, such as Cabcharge, add a 10 per cent payment processing fee to credit card payments. National Australia Bank is the acquiring bank for Cabcharge.The RBA said that "in the taxi industry... the reasonable cost of card acceptance would also include some allowance for the capital cost of the provider."The RBA also said that "in the case of the taxi industry, the bank notes that the 2012 draft report of the Taxi Industry Inquiry in Victoria suggested regulating service fees so they did not exceed the resource cost of providing electronic payment services - i.e. excluding financial flows between processors, operators and networks - and found no evidence that this should exceed five per cent of transaction value."Another reasonable cost, the RBA said, was the cost of fraud, an approach that the credit card schemes contest.Vipin Kalra, Visa's country manager for Australia, said in a statement that "we remain of the belief that merchants should not be able to pass on fraud costs as part of surcharges."