Not necessarily.

All Payment Service Providers supporting the Pricing Comparison service enable least-cost routing as standard (which means multi-network contactless debit card transactions are routed to the lowest cost network, typically eftpos). Most industry offers to the liquor industry (e.g. NAB, Till Payments, CBA) leverage Metcash strategic merchant rates which require routing of multi-network contactless debit card transactions to Visa and Mastercard. As the card mix when least-cost routing is enabled is very different, it is not possible to make a decision just by comparing the rate schedules.

To compare the offers, you need to ask the alternate provider to give you an annual fee estimate based on the same merchant statement that you submitted to the RDA Pricing Comparison service and then compare this to the reports we have provided you.

As an example of the potential impact of a routing difference, a Visa/Mastercard debit transaction with average value of $45 at a MSF % of 0.343% would incur a MSF of $0.15435, which would be 54% higher than if it was routed to eftpos at a $0.10 transaction fee.

It is also important to understand with flat all-inclusive rates, how this differs from the rates applied previously for each card type. For example, if a single flat rate is applied to all card transactions, then eftpos transactions that may previously have incurred a lower transaction fee, $0.10 in the above example, would now be charged at the flat 0.343% rate incurring a higher $0.15435 transaction fee.