Adelaide Miller

And we know that small businesses work with some of the tightest margins, so they don't really have the same capacity as, say, Coles or Woolworths to just absorb those costs.

And it's probably worth noting that they, up until now, have paid a lot more in interchange fees than, say, Coles or Woolworths.

Yeah, definitely.

You've always got a few bad apples in the ring and it's going to make sure that they are doing the right thing.

So that is a good thing.

But for those businesses that are

have been surcharging and will still have certain costs coming through, it could mean, and the RBA did say this yesterday, that these businesses have the option to increase the sticker price on the menu.

So it might sort of at face value sound like, oh, okay, this is a win.

And they're sort of saying that it's going to save consumers and businesses $1.8 billion a year in surcharging fees, 1.6 for consumers,

$200 million for businesses and then together, if my maths is right, that's $1.8 million.

But what we could see is that actually the price of the goods and services may go up because businesses need to survive.

prices right yeah so they're still going to have an interchange fee what we're seeing is that the interchange fee for debit cards is going to reduce 20 percent from 0.2 to 0.16 and then for credit cards

0.8 to 0.3 percent, but there's still going to be costs there.

So there's a chance that we're going to see prices rise.

And that's tricky for small businesses because they obviously want to be competitive.

They don't want to have to put their prices up, particularly when they're also facing other challenges like fuel cost increases.

There's been a lot of

different thoughts that have been shared.

The Australian Banking Association is probably one to note.

Simon Birmingham came out yesterday with some comments and is a bit worried that these changes that are coming through, we're talking about, as we said, $1.8 billion in surcharging fees that will be saved each year.