Card Schemes
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Card Schemes Europe could irreversibly lose its position in the payment market Fabian Meyer Leon Kuhlmann Sebastian Müller März 2019 Blogpost Copyright © CORE SE Key Facts Payment infrastructures are vital for the functioning and the stability of economic systems; Card schemes are still an essential part of this crucial infrastructure The card scheme ecosystem is globally characterized by: a) a large number of local domestic schemes and b) a few global schemes. Global schemes tend to invest massively into adapting to the high rate of change in the payment market – often by offering services without additional fees (“follow-the-free”), making them increasingly able to out-compete even well-established domestic schemes in their home markets The market is thus more and more dominated by a triumvirate of global schemes: Visa, Mastercard (both U.S.) and UnionPay (China), which between them form a virtual oligopoly This oligopoly is already beginning to manifest itself by its characteristic downsides, such as the lack of competitive pricing and one-sided dependencies; regions other than the U.S. and China potentially even face a geo-strategic risk, as the U.S. and Chinese governments have the means to control and harness those networks in the name of national interest These types of dependencies can only be broken up with a combination of innovation and the compelling will of both government and industry. Some governments have already taken action (e.g. Singapore) and are working towards establishing and growing domestic payment schemes, whilst others (e.g. in Europe) are still lacking the necessary political will https://core.se/techmonitor/card-schemes © CORE SE 2019 Page 2 Report Card schemes today – the global payment network infrastructure Card schemes enable simplified exchange of money between merchants, customers, and their banks, by operating international networks and setting uniform standards. More specifically, they define rules for the routing of payment authorizations and settlement requests in point-of-sale and e-commerce transactions between merchant acquirers and card issuers, as well as ATM withdrawals or purchases with cashback transactions. Figure 1: Descpiction of card schemes in respective countries Figure 11 shows selected payment schemes (private, debit and/or credit) and their respective countries of origin - from national or regional schemes such as Girocard (Germany) and Cartes Bancaires (France) to big players like Visa (U.S.) and UnionPay (China). While surely not complete, the world map serves to illustrate the wide variety and regional distribution of extant schemes, with a lot of different players. Yet when taking a look at the underlying figures, the heterogeneity is not as balanced as it may appear. One third of the payment cards in worldwide circulation are private label cards, another third is UnionPay and the last third is divided between Visa, Mastercard and 1.2 billion domestic cards, together representing the rest of the cards in circulation (Figure 2). Private label cards are mostly retailer cards, such as issued by department stores (e.g. Macy’s, SAK, IKEA) or fuel station networks (e.g. Shell, Total). Many of those cards have no co-branding with Mastercard, Visa or UnionPay and thus only have limited acceptance at associated merchants. As the segment is very fragmented and due to those card’s limited usefulness, their share in overall purchase transactions and transaction volume is minimal. When considering only the three biggest card networks2, UnionPay has by far the largest number of payment cards in circulation, followed by VISA with only 3,2 billion and Mastercard with 1,8 billion cards. Circulation for other international card networks such as American Express (62 https://core.se/techmonitor/card-schemes © CORE SE 2019 Page 3 million cards) or JCB (9 million cards) is vanishingly small in comparison. These lower numbers are comparable with figures for cards in circulation for most domestic schemes, e.g. RuPay (459 million), Girocard (100 million), MIR (37 million) or Verve (20 million). Figure 2: Depiction of payment cards in circulation Figure 3: Global market shares, by number of transactions worldwide The imbalance in the market becomes even more evident when analyzing the total number of transactions3. Visa alone accounts for 50% of all card transactions worldwide, with almost 150 billion out of an annual total of 300 billion. The second biggest player is Mastercard with 75 billion followed by UnionPay with 60 billion transactions. This leaves only roughly 15 billion transactions, or 1/10 of Visa’s transactions, for all other schemes, including domestic payment schemes. The number of annually processed transactions in Europe is 63 billion4. The only domestic scheme dominating its respective domestic market is RuPay in India, with a domestic market share of 65% for debit and credit card payments (and about 0,46 billion transactions). Figure 4: Total transaction volume With respect to the total transaction volume (Figure 45), UnionPay dominates the global scheme market with a total transaction volume of 14.95 trillion USd in 2017. The second largest player is Visa with 11 trillion USD, followed by Mastercard as a distant third, with a transaction volume of 5,24 trillion USd. The presence of these players differs significantly across regions. UnionPay dominates the Asia- Pacific market6 with a market share of 76% by transaction volume (ca. 10 trillion USD), compared to Visa with 13% at 1,7 trillion USd, followed by Mastercard with 7% or 1 trillion USd. In other markets, such as the U.S., Europe, Middle East & Africa and Latin America, Visa is the leading player with the highest market share by transaction volume, followed by Mastercard. UnionPay is barely present in these markets at the time of writing. https://core.se/techmonitor/card-schemes © CORE SE 2019 Page 4 A glimpse of tomorrow - the payment market is changing and only schemes which adapt to these changes best will protect their standing Due to digitization and technological innovations, the payment market is experiencing rapid change. End-customer trends like the mobile-first paradigm and e-commerce payment preferences, new baseline technologies, e.g. NFC, instant payments, or Open Banking API, and new regulations, e.g. PSd2, change the market forces. Meanwhile, the payment behavior of consumers is evolving, with some tendencies being generally observable: a) an increasing expenditure in e-commerce, b) an increasing convergence between e-commerce and POS payments, c) a preference for direct to account products (i.e. debit cards, as opposed to credit products). The majority of these trends are fundamentally contradictory to the historic necessity of card schemes. In spite of that, and due to their global standardization, established infrastructures and broad acceptance by merchants and consumers, the “Big Three” card schemes are not only protecting their central role in the payment market, but they are even expanding their range of influence. The triumvirate is strengthening. This is achieved by three strategic mechanisms: 1. Due to their oligopolistic market position, the major card schemes are shaping the market. Visa and Mastercard, for instance, are stipulating the rules for card-not-present transactions (generally e-commerce) by originating and mandating the 3dsecure protocol for cardholder authentication or by promoting a global standard for NFC contactless transactions and mandating its utilization by card issuers in a next step. 2. Due to their financial potence, broad customer base and innovative power, the big card schemes are not only mandating new processes and technologies, but are also providing proprietary solutions for the requirements they impose. For instance, this has happened with tokenization, a basic technology for card virtualization: The card schemes’ association EMVCo mandated the utilization of tokenization technology for mobile payments, while the card schemes were offering their tokenization services, like Mastercard with MDES or Visa with VTS, in a follow-the-free approach in parallel. 3. Visa and Mastercard, originally being credit card schemes, had also established debit brands in addition, i.e. Maestro and V PAY. domestic debit schemes (e.g. Girocard) generally are being co-badged with these, to deliver both high acceptance and better coverage worldwide. In recent years, the schemes introduced their next-generation debit products, Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit, which are closing the functional gap to credit cards (e.g. e-commerce capability and virtualization) while allowing for direct charging of the customer account. As co-badging has established an expectation among consumers that domestic cards come with international acceptance, both Visa and Mastercard are well positioned to achieve market penetration quickly. At the same time, both Visa and Mastercard enter into global partnerships with other big players, such as recently with Apple or PayPal, and thereby ensure that they remain a centerpiece even in those innovative payments scenarios. In order to set up a competing card scheme and make that endeavour viable, domestic banks and card scheme operators would have to achieve market acceptance, security and functionality equivalent to what the “Big Three” can offer. This means, for instance, that they would need to offer comparable proprietary solutions for tokenization or 3Dsecure at low (or no) additional costs, https://core.se/techmonitor/card-schemes © CORE SE 2019 Page 5 or new payment means in mobile and e-commerce. Yet they lack the means to shoulder the substantial up-front investments that would be necessary, and also the required global bargaining power (e.g. vis-à-vis Apple) – among other things. Thus many issuers have decided in favor of the existing new debit brands Debit MC/Visa Debit and more are likely to follow. Moreover, it should be noted that the above strategic logic not only applies to payment services. It also goes beyond. One obvious example is MasterCard´s current attempt to establish global eId services in major cooperations, thus extending Mastercard’s services far beyond their initial scope.