[9] Payment cards, on the other hand, facilitate digital, contactless payments. But they are not accepted everywhere. And the Europe-wide acceptance of cards issued under national card schemes currently relies on agreements with international card schemes. As a result, people mostly use international schemes for cross-border card payments, and the European market for card payments is dominated by non-European schemes.
This point is intuitive, but it can also be formalised, showing that MAP rules can reduce macroeconomic volatility and improve aggregate welfare.4 We have plenty of evidence, both before and after the crisis, of discrepancies in real and financial cycles among euro-area countries. As an example, let us consider bank lending to firms and households during the last decade (Figure 1).