All these policy actions, accompanied by the expected maintenance of interest rates at their current level for a long period of time and an ongoing expansion of the ECB’s balance sheet, together with the commitment by the BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  Governing Council to take further unconventional policy actions should medium-term inflation expectations worsen or if the measures already decided on prove to be insufficient, has led to an unprecedented degree of monetary accommodation.
This latter approach would provide more merchants with routing choice, 4 but would entail far more substantial operational changes by debit card networks, issuers, merchant acquirers, merchants, and their processors. 5 As noted above, the law also requires rules that prohibit issuers and networks from inhibiting merchant routing choice.