Increasing the national prices would clearly be against the spirit of the review and would severely affect banks’ reputations and credibility in the eyes of their customers. Costs and prices are not only a matter of concern in the customer-to-bank domain, but also in the bank-to-bank domain. The multilateral interchange fee for the SDD has proven to be a controversial issue.
The main justification for the current practice is that the economy is undergoing fundamental structural transformation and thus the behavioral relationships among the variables and the time lags influencing the behaviour are in a state of flux and transition.