Skopje, 6 May 2021 

The Draft-Law on Payment Services and Payment Systems transposes a large number of directives and regulations of the European Union in the field of payments, whereby we expect that there will be significant changes in terms of the expansion of the list of payment services providers and the set of payment services, as well as in terms of the more detailed regulation of the relations between the providers and the users of payment services. More specifically, this Law opens the payment services market for new players, and especially for those from the fintech sector, from whom we expect to offer innovative solutions for making payments that will be faster, cheaper and easier to use.

This was emphasized by the Manager of the Payment Systems Department of the National Bank, Igor Velickovski, in an interview with the portal “Banking”, dedicated to the new Law on Payment Services and Payment Systems, on which for a longer period of time, experts from the National Bank and from the Ministry of Finance jointly worked, supported by a project funded by the European Union. 

“For greater financial inclusion, a possibility is envisaged for citizens to open a payment account with main functions that will enable the execution of payment transactions to discharge their usual obligations (water, electricity, heating, Internet bills, etc.) or cash transfer to another person, without using an overdraft. To execute these transactions, the citizens will pay a reasonable amount of fees which may not be higher than 0.1% of the moving average of the average monthly net wage paid in the country for the previous 12 months, while the citizens who are the beneficiaries of certain legal rights will be able to obtain these services free of charge. The minimum number of transactions that should be provided by banks at this price for the citizens is at least five transactions per month, whereby this number will include only the payments aimed at other legal entities and natural persons who are clients of the same bank.” - Velickovski says.

Velickovski points out that according to the latest available data for 2020 that are published by the National Bank, the average fee that payment services providers charged to merchants for the payments executed with payment cards is 1.21%, whereby it varies depending on the activity and the size of the merchant and ranges from average 0.77% for information technology and appliances to 2.71% for e-commerce. Merchants further transfer these costs to consumers through higher prices of products and services.

“In order to reduce these costs, the amount of interchange fees is planned to be limited to 1% of the value of the payment transaction in mid-2022 and to be gradually reduced and at the beginning of 2025 to be reduced to 0.2% and 0.3% of the value of the payment transactions executed with debit, i.e. credit cards, as are currently set in the European Union counties.” - he says.

The new Law provides for payment service providers to submit data to the National Bank on the amount of the fees for the most representative services related to the payment account. 

"The National Bank will regularly publish on its website these fees by individual payment service provider in a comparative context. In this way, consumers will have fast and easily available information on the fees when they decide on which provider to use payment services from. Thus, the increased transparency and eased comparability of fees will create conditions for more favorable prices for using payment services by the citizens.” - says the Manager of the Payment Systems Department of the National Bank.

As mentioned in the interview, the enforcement of the Law will depend on its adoption, where the dynamics set in the Draft-Law according to the plan of the Ministry of Finance would enable enforcement at the beginning of the next year, and certain sections of the Law which impose significant changes in the information systems of payment services providers would start to be applied later in order to leave sufficient time for their successful implementation.

The interview is available at: https://bankarstvo.mk/интервју-величковски-со-законот-за-пл/