21
Payments Regulation in Asia
Co-badging Regulation Card networks such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, UnionPay, Discover, and JCB are payment networks that operate on an international scale and typically have an extensive network of merchants and financial institution partners around the globe. On the other hand, local card networks like RuPay in India and eftpos in Australia are payment networks that operate within a specific country or region, serving the payment needs of the local population. Co-badging refers to a single payment card that has at least two or more unaffiliated payment card networks enabled on it, allowing the card to be used for transactions across multiple payment networks. Oftentimes, co-badged cards will have a global and local network badged. In countries that have co-badging and merchant-choice routing on these transactions, such as the United States and Australia, merchants are able to route transactions to the most cost-effective and efficient network, providing merchants the opportunity to reduce their payment costs and generate competition between card networks. Co-badging more than one network on cards also implies greater cost efficiencies, higher availability, and better uptime. Table 5 illustrates the presence of local networks around the APAC region. While there may be functional variations aside from cost, such as no online functionality for some local networks or integration challenges between global networks and local digital wallets, these networks are motivated to enhance functionality to incentivize merchants and cardholder usage.
Country
Local Card Networks
Local Market Share
Australia
Eftpos
20%
India
RuPay
14%
Japan
Suica, Aeon, J-Debit
4-10%
Singapore
NETS
17%
Table 6. Domestic Debit Networks by Country and Market Share
Powered by FlippingBook