An open letter from our CEO

An open letter to the critics of the surcharge ban.

To the business lobbies, commentators and politicians campaigning against the surcharge ban,

You are right about one thing. The cost of accepting a card did not vanish on 1 October. It moved from the customer’s receipt to the merchant’s margin.

You are wrong about everything that follows. You are fighting to bring back a sticker on the terminal. You should be fighting the fee behind it.

Australia was the outlier, not the pioneer

The European Union and the United Kingdom banned surcharges on consumer cards in 2018. Their cafes still open every morning. Their payment systems did not collapse.

The Reserve Bank compared our rules with five other jurisdictions before it acted. On debit cards, only Australia and New Zealand still let a merchant charge people extra to spend their own money. In the United States and Canada, the card schemes themselves forbid it.

So spare us the claim that Australia has done something radical. We were among the last to stop.

 This was always about honest prices

The Reserve Bank never promised you a cheaper coffee. Governor Michele Bullock said the surcharging rules were complex and confusing, that surcharges were poorly disclosed, and that most consumers wanted them gone. The price on the board is now the price you pay. That is the reform.

Yes, some of this may have been sold it as cost-of-living relief. That may have been overselling, and you are entitled to say so. But attacking the sales pitch is not an argument for bringing back drip pricing.

Nor did the surcharge ever protect small business. By the Reserve Bank’s own numbers, small merchants pay about three times the per-transaction card fee that large merchants pay. Merchants paid an estimated $6.4 billion in card fees in 2022–23. The surcharge hid that bill. It never shrank it. The only people who benefitted from the surcharge was payment providers, not small businesses.

The Reserve Bank has cut the interchange cap on consumer credit cards from 0.8% to 0.3%. It expects merchants to save about $910 million a year. That is welcome, and it is nowhere near enough.

The ATO row is the dumbest fight of the lot

The loudest outrage this month has been about the tax office. It deserves the least sympathy.

The ATO said it would stop taking credit cards after 30 November because it would not pass card fees on to the community. Only 2.3% of tax payments were made by credit card in 2024–25. More than 60% of those card payments came from wealthy private groups and public and multinational businesses.

You called that hypocrisy. The Treasurer then found public money to keep the option open until 30 June 2027. Read that again. Every taxpayer now helps cover card fees so a small minority can keep paying tax on credit.

None of this is unusual. Britain’s HMRC stopped taking personal credit cards in January 2018, when the UK surcharge ban began, for the same reason. The US Internal Revenue Service does not take cards directly. It sends you to outside processors that charge 1.75% to 1.85% on a credit card, and none of that fee goes to the IRS. Canada’s Revenue Agency does the same. That is exactly where the ATO will land after June 2027.

A small business that must put its tax bill on a credit card has a cash flow problem. It deserves a real answer to that problem, not a public subsidy for card networks.

Other countries already pay without the card networks

A country does not need Visa or Mastercard to sell a coffee. Several already prove it, with a phone, a QR code and a bank account.

These are not experiments. In Switzerland, 77% of TWINT transactions last year were commercial payments, not friends splitting a bill. South Korea built Zero Pay, a QR network that pays small merchants straight from the shopper’s bank account, to spare shopkeepers card fees.

Australia has the same plumbing. The New Payments Platform (NPP) processed nearly 2 billion real-time payments in 2025 and reaches 128 million accounts. The Reserve Bank helped build it. We do not lack the technology. We lack the will to use it at the checkout.

Why are overseas schemes still in the middle?

Overseas schemes like Visa, Mastercard and others built something valuable. They made it possible to pay a stranger anywhere in the world, and they still do that well. When you travel or buy from overseas, they earn their place.

But technology has moved on. When a customer in Parramatta pays a baker in Parramatta, both accounts sit in Australian banks. The money can move between them in seconds, on infrastructure Australia already owns. Why should that payment detour through two American companies and pay a toll on the way?

Every Australian should ask that question. Every critic of the ban should ask it twice. You have spent months defending a merchant’s right to pass on a fee. Too few of you have asked why the fee exists.

The banks will not fix this for you. They earn interchange on every card payment and move at the speed of a committee. Nor will the fintech providers who promised to rescue small business, then stacked their own margins on the same card rails.

What Pyng is doing about it

We run Pyng, so discount what follows as you see fit.

Pyng lets a customer pay a merchant straight from their bank account, by scanning a QR code or tapping a Pyng terminal. The payment runs on the New Payments Platform. There is no card network, no interchange and no transaction fee. The money reaches the merchant in seconds, and paid plans start at $29 a month.

Pyng is not perfect. Not every customer has it on their phone yet, and it will not replace a card for an overseas visitor. We are a young company with a great deal left to build.

But hundreds of merchants across Australia already take payments with Pyng. They did not wait for a lobby group to save them. They found a simple way to get paid without Visa, Mastercard, a bank’s paperwork or a payment provider’s margin.

Our challenge to you

Stop campaigning to restore the surcharge. It is gone here, as it has been across Europe and Britain since 2018.

Put that energy into the question that matters. Demand that banks make paying from your account at the checkout as easy as a tap. Demand that government agencies and big retailers accept it. Tell your members they have a choice today.

The surcharge was never the problem. The fee was. Australia already has the means to get rid of it.

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