From October, consumers stop paying card surcharges. But the costs behind them don't disappear.
The RBA reform package also reduces interchange fee caps, which should lower card acceptance costs for many businesses over time. For billers processing at scale, however, the full picture is more nuanced than either headline suggests.
What the ban actually changes
Many billers are focused on the regulatory requirement: remove the surcharge, update payment pages. That addresses the October deadline. But what's missing from a lot of the conversations is the discussion around what happens after that.
When a customer pays a bill by card today, many billers recover the processing cost through a surcharge. From October, that recovery mechanism is gone. The processing cost remains and, even with interchange reductions factored in, sits largely inside the biller's margin.
For a large utility, insurer, or telco processing hundreds of thousands of payments a month, that's not a rounding error. Removing the surcharge addresses the regulatory requirement, but it doesn't resolve the underlying cost question.
The real question is what customers pay with
Once surcharging is off the table, the cost a biller absorbs isn't fixed. It depends directly on how customers choose to pay. Different payment methods carry different processing costs.
The mix across a biller's customer base, not just whether lower-cost options are available, but how often customers actually choose them, determines how much of the cost shift lands on the P&L.
The surcharge ban creates a compliance deadline. What sits behind it is a longer-term question about customer payment behaviour. Managing it well means actively shaping how customers pay, not just accepting whatever mix emerges by default.
Availability isn't adoption
For billers who have already enabled lower-cost payment methods, that's the first step. Fewer have thought deeply about how to make those options the obvious choice at the moment a customer is actually thinking about paying their bill.
Consumer research we conducted with Fifth Quadrant tells a useful story about the gap between availability and intent. 35% of Australians are aware of PayTo but when it's explained to them, almost 50% say they'd use it to pay bills, rising to 65% among 30 to 44 year olds. The appetite is there. Most billers haven't yet given customers the opportunity to act on it.
The highest-intent payment moment is when a bill reminder arrives. Offering a low-cost option is a start, but how it's presented (in a bill reminder before payment is due, at the point of payment itself, with clear and simple framing) determines whether customers actually choose it. Making an option available and making it the obvious choice are two different things.
October is the starting point, not the finish line
The billers who manage this well will do a few things differently. They'll understand their current payment method mix and what it actually costs them. They'll make lower-cost options visible and easy at the moments that matter: in bill reminders, payment requests, and the channels customers are already using. And they'll treat payment behaviour as something to actively manage, not something that just happens.
Glider helps billers shape payment behaviour at the moments customers are most likely to act, through better payment communications and experiences across every channel. If you're working through what this means for your organisation, we'd welcome the conversation. Get in touch.
