PSR issues final guidance on IFR rules

The Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) has published its final guidance on the new European legislation surrounding payment cards. The paper sets out the regulator’s approach to the monitoring and enforcement of the Interchange Fee Regulation (IFR) in the UK. The IFR affects the way card payment systems operate in Europe and, most notably, introduced caps on interchange fees. These came into effect in December 2015, with each EU member state given ‘local discretion’ on the final levels, within a set band. In the UK, the Treasury set the caps at 0.2 per cent of the value of a transaction for debit cards, and 0.3 per cent for credit cards.