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The federal Minister of Finance has announced a task force to review the payments system in Canada and make recommendations for future practice. The review will cover all institutions, instruments and services that support the transfer of value between parties.  For more information, visit www.paymentsystemreview.ca.

CRFA’s submission

After consulting with a number of members, CRFA submitted these key challenges to the task force on behalf of the foodservice industry:

1.    Business owners have to absorb the processing fee (or merchant discount rate) on the sales tax they collect for the government.

2.    Merchant discount rates have skyrocketed to fund new credit card consumer reward programs; therefore, consumers are incented to use a payment method that is becoming more expensive to accept.
 
3.    The switch to chip and PIN technology carries significant new costs – such as labour costs of staff standing by while customers input their PIN and costs of new terminals.

4.    Significant changes in credit card liability erode the benefits to merchants of accepting credit cards. For example, merchants are liable if they do not have a PIN machine, merchants have to absorb the cost of new PCI compliance software, and merchants have to incur rising costs of new technology without having any savings from reduced fraud passed on to them.

5.    Newer technology is more expensive – from terminal rental to the paper used in machines, everything costs more.

For CRFA’s full submission, click here.