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Australia’s decision to remove card surcharges is being framed as a win for consumers. It is. But for payments providers, it is also something else: a reset of where competitive pressure now sits. From 1 October 2026, surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa debit, prepaid and credit cards will be removed, alongside lower domestic interchange caps and new fee transparency measures. The result is a simpler checkout, clearer pricing, and stronger pressure on providers to compete on value rather than complexity.
Key takeaways
- The RBA’s surcharge reforms will make pricing easier to compare and increase pressure on payment providers to compete on execution.
- That pressure is shifting upstream into merchant onboarding, underwriting, risk handling, and compliance operations.
- In a more transparent market, digital onboarding, KYB, KYC, AML screening, underwriting, and ongoing due diligence need to work as one connected workflow.
- OnBoard by MVSI is designed for this shift, helping regulated payments, fintech, and financial services teams streamline merchant onboarding and compliance automation in one system.
Why the RBA’s surcharge reforms could improve trust in payments
The RBA’s logic is straightforward. Surcharging no longer works as intended. It was originally meant to steer consumers towards cheaper payment choices, but in a market where cash is used less and surcharges are harder to avoid, that logic has broken down. The RBA says surcharging has become complex, confusing and poorly disclosed. In its review, only 13 percent of consumers said they are always told about surcharges when they shop, while 76 percent said they want surcharging to stop.
The broader point is this: trust in payments is built on clarity. When the advertised price is not the price paid, friction enters at the worst possible moment: the point of purchase. Removing surcharges should make the checkout cleaner and easier to understand. It also aligns with a broader market expectation that pricing should be visible, predictable and fair. Treasury says Australians currently pay around A$1.6 billion a year in card surcharges, while the reform package is intended to save small businesses about A$910 million a year through lower fees and greater transparency.
The RBA’s surcharge reforms will intensify competition for payment providers
This is where the story becomes more consequential for acquirers, Payment Service Providers (PSPs), Payment Facilitator (PayFacs) and regulated fintechs.
The reform is not just about removing surcharges. It also pushes greater transparency into the payments chain. The RBA says eftpos, Mastercard, Visa and large acquirers will have to publish the fees they charge, while merchants will receive more standardised information to help them compare providers more easily and shop around with greater confidence. The Australian Banking Association frames the reforms in similar terms, highlighting easier cost comparison and stronger competition.
The result is a shift in the basis of competition. When merchants can no longer recover acceptance costs through a visible surcharge, and pricing becomes easier to compare, scrutiny shifts to the full economics of the relationship. Not just headline rates, but onboarding speed, time to activation, risk handling, support quality, and the operational cost of delays. In a more transparent market, payment providers will have to compete more clearly on value, service and execution, not pricing complexity.
The pressure is shifting from checkout to onboarding
The next competitive pressure point sits upstream, in merchant onboarding, underwriting, compliance operations and service delivery.
As pricing becomes easier to compare, merchants are likely to look more closely at the total experience of getting live. How quickly can they start taking payments? How many times do they need to submit the same information? How many applications get stuck in manual review? How much visibility exists once an application enters the process?
Those questions are becoming commercial pressure points, not operational details. Mastercard says traditional acquirers still take around 3 to 7 days to onboard a merchant, while PayFacs using more automated models can do it in 5 to 15 minutes. McKinsey has similarly noted that onboarding a new corporate client in financial services can take up to 100 days. In a market where merchants can no longer recover acceptance costs through a visible surcharge, those delays become harder to absorb and easier to compare. Providers with faster, cleaner onboarding will have a clearer advantage.
In a no-surcharge environment, the commercial impact of that gap becomes harder to ignore. When merchants can no longer rely on a visible surcharge to offset payment costs, inefficiencies elsewhere in the process stand out more quickly. Slow approvals feel more expensive. Rework feels more frustrating. Poor visibility feels less acceptable. What once sat quietly in operations now affects conversion, cost to serve and merchant confidence more directly.
Industry commentary already points in the same direction. In its response to the RBA decision, Tyro described the reforms as a structural shift toward greater transparency and stronger competition, and said merchants tied to surcharge-led and opaque bundled pricing structures may reassess their providers. That is a useful signal of what comes next. As the market becomes clearer, merchants are likely to re-evaluate not just pricing, but which providers create real operational value and which have relied on complexity to protect weaker economics.
Why end-to-end merchant onboarding and compliance automation create competitive advantage
The providers best positioned for this next phase will not be the ones that simply absorb the reform and move on. They will be the ones that redesign the merchant journey around speed, precision and lower operational friction.
That requires more than a point solution. It requires a unified approach to merchant onboarding, bringing digital onboarding, KYB and KYC, AML screening, underwriting and ongoing customer due diligence (OCDD) into a single workflow. Low-risk merchants should move quickly. Higher-risk merchants should be escalated with the right data, context and controls. Compliance should not sit downstream from sales. It should be built into the operating model from the start.
OnBoard by MVSI is an end-to-end merchant onboarding and compliance platform for regulated payments, fintech and financial services and was built for exactly this kind of environment. Rather than treating onboarding, KYB, KYC, AML screening, underwriting, and ongoing customer due diligence (OCDD) as separate tasks spread across disconnected systems, OnBoard brings them all into one unified workflow so regulated , fintech and financial services teams can activate the right merchants faster, with better control, less friction and stronger compliance automation.
The commercial case is already visible in market. In MVSI’s Nayax Australia case study, Nayax used OnBoard to support a network of 100+ partners, onboard 8,000+ new businesses, and reduce onboarding time by 98%. As pricing becomes easier to compare and inefficiencies become easier to spot, improvements like that translate into a clearer competitive edge.
A simpler checkout raises the bar everywhere else in merchant onboarding and payments operations
The most visible change is at checkout, but the commercial pressure does not stop there. As visible surcharges disappear, payment providers have less room to carry operational inefficiency without it being felt elsewhere. Competition shifts away from recovery mechanisms and toward execution. The RBA’s own framing supports that direction, positioning the reforms as a move toward simpler, more transparent card payments and stronger competition among payment service providers.
That raises the importance of merchant onboarding, risk handling and operational design. These are no longer just compliance processes or internal checkpoints. They shape margin, conversion, time to revenue and merchant trust. In a more transparent market, delays, rework and poor visibility become harder to justify and easier for merchants to compare across providers.
The providers that respond best to the RBA’s reforms will not just revise their pricing pages. They will ask a harder operational question: where does friction still sit in the merchant journey, and how quickly can it be removed? That is where the next competitive edge will be built.
The checkout may be getting simpler, but competitive advantage will be won in the parts of the merchant journey that still create friction. For many providers, that means rethinking merchant onboarding as a connected compliance and activation workflow, not a sequence of disconnected checks.
Turn operational pressure into competitive advantage
The RBA’s surcharge reforms will make pricing easier to compare. The next differentiator will be how efficiently payment providers onboard, assess and activate the right merchants.
OnBoard by MVSI helps regulated payments, fintech and financial services teams bring digital onboarding, KYB and KYC, AML screening, underwriting and ongoing customer due diligence into one connected workflow. The result is faster activation, stronger control and less friction across the merchant journey.
See how OnBoard can help simplify compliance, accelerate onboarding and strengthen merchant experience. Book a demo.
This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or regulatory advice.
