Wind of Change for Card Acquirers – Challenges for the card acquirer s

Obviously, the consolidation within the European acquiring industry market is underway. The country profiles of the Payment Cards Statistical Yearbooks provide the individual background of the card acquirers by country, including new challenges, joint ventures, investments and acquisitions.

In 2014, Europe had a fragmented card acquirer market with more than 300

Wind of Change for Card Acquirers –
Challenges for the card acquirer service model

acquirers accepting cards at millions of POS terminals, on the internet and mobile.
Following the implementation of the Payment Services Directive (PSD) in the European Economic Area (EEA), both the card payments industry and card-less payment service providers benefit from a common legal framework for payment services in the EEA region.
However, the domestic acquirer banks face significant competition from foreign cross-border acquirers, e.g. WorldPay and BarclayCard GPA with 6.4 million and 3.8 billion accepted card payments, respectively, which have become the largest acquirers in Europe.
The new compliance challenges for acquirers include EU directives (e.g. PSD2, Interchange Fee Regulation) and security requirements (e.g. EMV, PCI and tokenization).
Disruptive technologies driven by the schemes and by competing Fintechs require continuous investment into acquirer systems: contactless POS terminals, Mobile NFC payments, MPOS terminals, cloud-based (HCE, QR, apps, BLE) and digital payments.
Card-less digital payment services such as digital wallets, prepaid products, direct debits and credit transfers challenge the card acquirer banks.

The Payment Cards Statistical Yearbooks give a market leading and comprehensive up-to-date picture (data to end 2013) of the card issuing, acquiring and processing business within 43 countries plus pan European and Eurasian overviews and more…

The reports are recognised throughout the payments industry as the most authoritative source of market and business information on the European and Eurasian payment markets.

The report comprises of 2 volumes – Volume 1 covers payments statistics of the 33 European countries and Volume 2 contains the Eurasian payments statistics on 10 countries. The European Payment Cards Yearbook and Eurasian Payment Cards Yearbook 2014–15 are available to purchase as complete volumes or as individual country profiles.