These reforms have had an immediate and positive impact on the payment card landscape. The cost of payment card acceptance had started to moderate whilst the annual growth of payment card terminals had tripled from 5.4% in 2014 to 18.1% in 2015. In addition to promoting effective competition within the payment industry, it is also important to preserve the neutrality of Payment and Settlement Systems. This includes neutrality among instruments and geo-political interests. This is especially true for global and critical market infrastructure providers such as SWIFT where the offer of services to all parts of the world should be guaranteed and reliable. The emergence of other service providers to fill any void should it happen, would be most unfortunate as it could diminish efficiencies gained from access to global market infrastructures. As a participant-owned institution, adequate safeguards to maintain SWIFT’s neutrality and finality are essential to ensure it continues to serve its mandate as a trusted provider of secure financial messaging services to facilitate global connectivity. Opportunities from greater standardization and interoperability Let me now move on to the need for standardization and interoperability in Payment and Settlement Systems. Proprietary and legacy systems are costly and a source of much inefficiency as time and resources are needed to maintain different systems and facilitate interconnectivity. Hence, there is much value for the financial community to collaborate through greater standardization to facilitate interoperability and innovation to achieve greater economies of scale and network multiplier effects.

Lack of effective competition in the payment card industry had led to higher costs for payment card transactions, which would in turn raise costs for businesses and consumers. Over a period of 14 months from May 2013 to June 2014, interchange fee, that is the wholesale fee paid between banks in a payment card transaction, were hiked several times. As interchange fee is priced into the MDR, the hikes in interchange fee contributed towards an increase in the MDR for merchants. A lack of price transparency and the overall competition further weakened market pressure to lower interchange fee and MDR. BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  The highly concentrated market also discouraged merchants from switching to another payment card network given concerns over losing significant competitive advantage if they did. Clearly, left unchecked, such indiscriminate interchange fee hikes risked bringing about a broad-based increase in MDR which would in turn be passed on to consumers through higher retail prices of goods and services. To curb indiscriminate increases in payment card acceptance cost and foster a competitive payment card market, Bank Negara Malaysia implemented the Payment Card Reform Framework in July 2015. Under the Framework, the interchange fees are subject to objectively-set ceilings, while a market incentive structure was instituted to strengthen the incentives for investments in payment card infrastructure. In addition, measures were also introduced to enhance transparency and competition by prohibiting restrictive trade practices. The results of such measures are very encouraging.