Reserve Bank of Australia to introduce caps on interchange fees
· payments
The Reserve Bank of Australia is to ban merchant surcharging and cap interchange fees in an effort to boost competition in the payments sector.
Product Blueprint
SwapRoute AU — a merchant payment routing intelligence layer that automatically selects the lowest-cost payment rail for each transaction after RBA interchange caps and surcharge ban take effect, surfacing real-time savings vs. prior fee structures.
Why it matters
The surcharge ban eliminates merchants' cost-recovery safety valve overnight, forcing them to actually optimize payment costs for the first time. Interchange cap changes reset acquirer pricing contracts, creating a 6–12 month window where merchants will actively switch providers and tools.
Target user
Australian SMB owners and finance managers at mid-market retailers (10–200 staff) who are losing the ability to surcharge and need to recover margin through smarter routing and acquirer negotiation — not through customer fees.
Go-to-market
Integrate with Xero and MYOB via existing APIs to pull merchant payment data, then show a free 'fee impact report' quantifying what the surcharge ban will cost them monthly — convert the top 10 report recipients into paid routing advisory subscribers at $199/month before the ban takes effect.
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