Multilateral Interchange Fees: Competition and regulation in light of recent legislative developments. ECRI Research Report No. 14, 31 January 2014

Two-sided payment card markets generate costs that have to be distributed among the participating actors. For this purpose, payment card networks set an interchange fee, which is the fee paid by the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank per transaction. While in recent years many antitrust authorities all over the world - including the European Commission - have opened proceedings against card brands in order to verify whether agreements to collectively establish the level of interchange fees are anticompetitive, the Reserve Bank of Australia – as a regulator - has directly tried to address market failures by lowering the level of interchange fees and changing some network rules. The US has followed with new legislation on financial consumer protection, which also intervenes on interchange fees. This has opened a strong debate not only on legitimacy of interchange fees, but also on the appropriateness of different public tools to address such issues. Drawing from economic and legal theories and a comparative analysis of recent case law in the EU and other jurisdictions, this work investigates whether a regulation rather than a purely competition policy approach would be more appropriate in this field, considering in particular, at EU level, all of the competition and regulatory concerns that have arisen from the operation of SEPA with multilateral interchange fees. The paper concludes that a wider regulation approach could address some of the shortcomings of a purely antitrust approach, proving to be highly beneficial to the development of an efficient European single payments area.

Transnistrian Conflict after 20 years: A Report by an International Expert Group. OSW Report, October 2011

The present report is the result of an initiative put forward in 2010 by the Soros Foundation Moldova (East East: Partnership Beyond Borders Program) with the aim of attracting new foreign expertise to provide a fresh look at the ‘frozen conflict’ in the Republic of Moldova. The initiative was informed by the conviction that the political shifts in and around Moldova that have occurred since 2009 are creating new opportunities to resolve the conflict. The idea was to convene a joint group of international and Moldovan experts who, after conducting a fact-finding field trip to Chisinau and Tiraspol and conducting extensive discussions, would draw up a report with their analysis of the situation and their political recommendations.