Monitoring

Interchange fee regulation – final decision

The Commission is responsible for promoting competition and efficiency across the retail payment system in New Zealand for the benefit of consumers and businesses making and receiving payments.

On 17 July 2025 we published our final decision aimed at reducing fees paid by New Zealand businesses for accepting Mastercard and Visa payments. This followed our draft decision in December 2024, and consultation that included both submissions and cross-submissions.

The associated final network standard, which revokes the initial pricing standard as at 1 December 2025, was published on 17 July 2025. The Commission recently identified a minor cross-referencing error in the final network standard, and subsequently amended it to rectify that error on 14 August 2025.

Initial market monitoring

Through 2022 and 2023 we are engaging with participants across different retail payment networks to increase our understanding of the retail payment system and inform where to focus our efforts to deliver long-term benefits for consumers and merchants.

As part of our ongoing market monitoring role, in August 2023 we published our assessment of the impact of pricing limits imposed on domestic interchange fees from November 2022. It includes an estimate of how much businesses are benefiting through lower merchant service fees for accepting contactless and credit card. payments because of the pricing limits

Previous updates on our monitoring work are available under the project timeline below.

Merchant research

In 2022, we asked Kantar Public to survey New Zealand merchants to better understand their experiences and perspectives on the retail payment system.

From Kantar’s report, and some additional work we undertook, we published our observations on how well the retail payment system is currently serving merchants.

Both reports can be accessed below.