After the claims of ADEBA and the accusations crossed with the fintech, now it is the entities grouped in ABA that are asking to move towards a “full QR”
The new round in the old fight between banks and fintech is heating up. After the claims of the entities that ADEBA brings together and the accusations crossed with Mercado Pago, now it is the international capital banks that request that the interoperable QRs regulated by the Central Bank also include payments initiated with credit cards.
In a letter signed by Claudio Cesario, the president of the Argentine Banking Association, which brings together entities such as the Banco Santander, BBVA, HSBC and ICBC, among others, the banks warned that although payments through QR continue to gain market share, “in practice for users and businesses there is still a lot of friction at the time of making a payment.
The Transfers 3.0 system, launched at the end of 2021, aimed to “open” the systems of banks and wallets to be able to pay by scanning a common QR code and for users to make sending money account to account immediately, and at no cost. Although the adoption is on the rise, for more or less a year, the entities request that this option also be open to payments that are made through a QR, but using a credit card.
“Although the (system of) Payments with Transfers (PCT) is interoperable between banks and fintechs, this is not extensible to payments with QR initiated by credit card, since they can only pay through QR with credit cards if they are customers of the company that provides the QR Code to the businessCesario explained.
The statement warns that, as a consequence of this “barrier”, two things happen: “vendors are forced to increase your costs by hiring more than one QR provider so as not to lose customers”, on the one hand. And on the other, customers are “forced to add their credit card to the majority QR provider to be able to carry out the operation they want or otherwise bear a overcost of almost the 8% direct on the value of the transaction”.
As in the two claims by ADEBA, the foreign entities claim that there is a asymmetric situation between the POS collection terminals (those offered by processors related to banks), in which businesses are allowed to charge with debit, credit and scan the interoperable QR; and those offered by fintech, such as Mercado Pago.
“The banks they see no reason so that, despite the claims made to the BCRA, the full interoperable operation of the QR for credit cards continues to be delayed,” the letter says. Clarion consulted the Central Bank about the formal status of these claims and what is the position that the monetary authority is going to take in this fight and had no comment on it.
less cost
The entities say that if credit cards are added to “full” interoperability, costs would be reduced “for businesses because would not be forced to hire different providers, and it would mean less shifting of that burden to consumers.”
And that customers would also benefit, since this would give them the possibility of access quotas and not only being able to make a purchase using the balance in your sight accounts or in payment accounts, such as the Savings Bank or Current Account “and Payment Accounts”, without first having to be forced to add your credit card to the platform you have a dominant position in the market, they say.
In short, banks warn that, by not being able to offer customers an “all-in-one solution” to charge digitally, businesses acquire different payment platforms. And there another crack opens: the entities ensure that the “charges” they charge to businesses for payment processing have been regulated by the BCRA since 2017. “with a decreasing trend” and not so those who charge the fintech.
“For many years, tax asymmetries favored fintech under the hypothesis that it was a condition for the growth of the ecosystem and they lasted even for bigtech for a long time, facilitating their expansion and investment capacity,” the document stated.
“Banks, meanwhile, continued to be affected by municipal rates, provincial and national taxes. Notwithstanding which, they made significant investments in technology and ATM networks that are used by fintech users,” he remarked.