Much Ado About Nothing

Today the European Commission released its long awaited study into the cost of merchants accepting cash and card payments. A copy of the preliminary presentation can be found here. It’s long awaited for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is supposed to finally address the issue of comparing actual costs. Whilst there have been many studies in the past that looked at this, nearly all had a flaw. Those commissioned by one of the interested parties had such inherent biases that it rendered them almost unusable. For example, the anti-cards lobby conveniently chose to inhabit a magic kingdom where labour was free and cash magically appeared and disappeared from stores, free of charge! Academic studies have typically been too academic – lots of interesting formulae, but not grounded in reality. The Commission set out, once and for all, to get a definitive answer. That’s the second reason why it is important. The Commission has taken what many believe as an “anti-card” stance, with a view that cards are unnecessarily expensive. At the same time, they are actively promoting electronic payments as paper/cash is costly and inefficient, but not taking into account some fundamental differences, such as cards are a commercial business, whilst cash is supplied in essence by the State (I know, I know – that sentence is a whole debate in itself!). The study then was supposed to create an unambiguous fact-base. The more cynical of us has wondered what happens if the study presents data that is contrary to the stance of the Commission, and that could contradict the last decade of activity from the Commission in this area! The programme has not been without it’s problems. A previous study commissioned a few years ago has never been released, and has been perceived as not reaching the answer the Commission wanted. This is primarily because the consultancy selected is highly regarded for their integrity and knowledge – by not sharing anything about the study, the market has reached it’s own conclusions. In the introduction to the document today though was a comment that it had “Unsatisfactory methodological recommendations.” Secondly, the request for a subsequent study was woefully underfunded. Unsurprisingly, the target number of merchants to study was not met by a considerable margin. This isn’t to criticize the firm that won the tender, more that the opportunity to do this right was never there. Alot of preamble – what did we learn? Not much. I wasn’t able to attend the presentation, so there is – literally – only the afore mentioned deck to study. For me the initial take-aways are:

• The fact that no clear conclusions could be reached yet, and that the sample size achieved was only 50% of the initial target highlights, either just how hard this is to do and/or, actually it's much closer than they thought. For example, if one payment type had substantially more costly than another it'd surely have been highlighted
• The low response rate and the bias to large merchants is likely to leave the survey open to criticism
• More detail is required to give comfort – for example, the cost seems to suggest some significant missing costs (such as CIT fees, bank cash handling fees, etc)

The net result is that we’ve not really any clearer, and we’re left wondering why they didn’t wait until they had reached some conclusions. Whilst we don’t have the commentary given during the presentation, the fact that the event and presentation didn’t even warrant its own press release suggests that not much was said. And so we’re left still in the dark, and probably, on balance, even less optimistic that we’ll get the answer that we all seek. Much ado about nothing!