Here’s why the devil of the RBA’s card surcharges ban could be in the details; and which ASX stocks could be hit hard?

After months of rumours, the possibility of a card surcharges ban was announced as a reality in 6 months time. The Reserve Bank of Australia published its long-awaited Conclusions Paper from the Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging this morning.

Now the headline ban on surcharges on debit, prepaid and credit cards across the eftpos, Mastercard and Visa networks from October 1 2026 is indeed the biggest story. It has generated predictable coverage and will continue to. On one hand, positive coverage about consumers saving money on their morning coffees and Uber rides, but negative coverage about consumers getting less frequent flyer points back. That story is real.

But it is also the least interesting part of what the RBA announced.

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What the RBA Actually Decided

The Payments System Board confirmed a three-part reform package.

First, the surcharge ban itself, which removes a framework the RBA acknowledges “is no longer achieving its intended purpose.” The original logic of surcharging was to steer consumers toward cheaper payment methods, but this collapsed as businesses began applying blanket percentage surcharges to all cards regardless of type, something the RBA found impossible to enforce.

Second, the RBA will lower caps on interchange fees, the per transaction fees that banks collect from merchants every time a card is swiped. Small businesses, which tend to pay rates closer to the existing caps, should benefit the most from this reduction.

Third, card networks and payment service providers will be required to publish transparent, standardised pricing, making it easier for merchants to compare providers and switch. Most of these changes take effect on October 1 2026. More complex reforms, including a new cap on fees charged on foreign-issued cards, will follow on April 1 2027.

The Merchant Pricing Question Nobody Is Asking

Much of the consumer coverage frames the surcharge ban as an east win. In reality, it is more complicated than that. Businesses that currently surcharge are not going to simply absorb those costs out of goodwill. Some will just reprice their goods and services to cover the cost.

The RBA’s own modelling suggests that if surcharges are removed and merchants adjust base prices, the overall consumer price level might increase by approximately 0.1 percentage points. That is a modest aggregate figure, but it is unevenly distributed. Consumers who paid in cash or already used cheap payment methods were effectively subsidising card users under the old system.

But under the new one, cost recovery will be folded into the price of almost everything. The businesses most exposed are those in low-margin, high-transaction-volume sectors – such as hospitality, transport, retail; where surcharging was doing genuine work to protect margins. For those operators, the October deadline is a repricing exercise, not a cost saving.

The ASX Stocks in the Frame

The most immediate market story centres on one name in the payments space.

Tyro Payments (ASX:TYR) is a provider of EFTPOS terminals and payment processing to approximately 68,000 small and medium businesses, with deep penetration in hospitality and healthcare.

When the RBA’s preliminary proposals were released in July 2025, the initial market reaction was panic: Tyro shares dropped heavily on fears it would lose revenue from surcharge-based products. The reaction on Tuesday was the opposite: Tyro’s share price rose 5.2% as the final conclusions paper was published. CEO Jon Davey moved quickly to welcome the decision, saying it would “increase transparency and lower card costs for both consumers and merchants.”

The reason for Tyro’s confidence is structural: only about 30% of its merchants apply surcharges, and its zero-cost EFTPOS surcharging product represents just 2% of total transaction value. The reform may even create an opportunity, in our view. We think merchants newly sensitised to payment costs will be shopping more aggressively for competitive processing rates, which is precisely the conversation Tyro wanted to spark.

Now, beyond Tyro, other stocks could be impacted even if it would be less extreme. The Big Four banks could be affected by this. The reduction in interchange fee caps directly compresses one of the more opaque revenue lines in retail banking.

Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn has previously warned that lower interchange fees would “devalue popular frequent flyer and loyalty point schemes.” The Australian Banking Association echoed this concern, noting that Australia’s interchange fees are already among the lowest in the world. Expect loyalty program terms to quietly tighten across CBA, ANZ, Westpac and NAB in the second half of 2026 as the economics of rewards cards are repriced downward.

The BNPL Consultation: The Devil In the Details

Buried at the bottom of Tuesday’s media release is the sentence that will attract the most attention in coming months. The RBA confirmed it plans to start a public consultation in mid-2026 to assess the public interest case for regulating areas of the payments system not covered by this review. It specifically named mobile wallets, three-party card networks, buy-now-pay-later services and e-commerce platforms.

This is a significant signal. BNPL services including Afterpay (owned by Block, ASX: SQ2) and Zip Co (ASX: ZIP) have long operated under a no-surcharge rule of their own. Merchants are contractually prohibited from passing BNPL fees on to consumers, even though BNPL merchant fees range between 3% and 6%, significantly higher than card interchange. The RBA has circled this arrangement as a competition concern for years. The government addressed one dimension in June 2025 by bringing BNPL under consumer credit law, requiring responsible lending checks and Australian Credit Licences. But the fee structure question remains unresolved.

If the mid-2026 consultation concludes that BNPL providers should be required to remove their no-surcharge rules, this will allow merchants to pass fees to consumers and the demand consequences could be materially severe. RBA survey data has previously found that roughly half of BNPL users would switch to alternative payment methods if faced with a surcharge, while a UBS study found two-thirds of Afterpay users would abandon the product at a 4% surcharge.

For Zip, which carries more consumer fee revenue than Afterpay and has been working to rebuild its balance sheet, a forced repricing of its merchant value proposition would arrive at a difficult moment. For Block and its Afterpay division, the concern is more about volume. After all, Afterpay’s entire model is built on high merchant fee revenue funded by a large and growing consumer base. Anything that slows the consumer adoption curve creates pressure on the merchant side.

Mobile wallets, especially Google and Apple Pay which were specifically named by the RBA, are also squarely in scope. These platforms currently benefit from a regulatory grey zone, charging card issuers a small fee per transaction that is ultimately funded by interchange. The RBA’s interest in transparency here is consistent with its broader goal of ensuring that payment costs visible to merchants and consumers reflect the actual economics of the system.

Reading the Room: The Card Surcharges Ban Seems Like Big News, But The Bigger News Is Yet To Come!

What Tuesday’s announcement really represents is the completion of Act One of a multi-act regulatory transformation of Australian payments. The surcharge ban and interchange reduction are meaningful but largely anticipated changes – the market had been pricing these in for over a year, which is why Tyro rose rather than fell on the news.

Act Two – the mid-2026 consultation covering BNPL, mobile wallets and e-commerce – is where genuine uncertainty lives. The RBA has a track record of following through on flagged reviews, and the language around “assessing the public interest case for regulating” is not the language of a body planning to leave things alone.

For investors with exposure to Zip, Block or any payments platform that depends on a no-surcharge clause to sustain its merchant fee model, the next consultation paper, expected before the end of 2026, is the document worth watching closely.