Germany's retail association rejects the planned card-acceptance duty and makes surcharging its price for accepting one

The Handelsverband Deutschland (HDE) came out against the Federal Finance Ministry's Eckpunktepapier for a statutory duty to offer a digital payment option, five days after dpa reported the paper. The association's payments lead Ulrich Binneboessel argues the law is unnecessary because German checkouts already take both cash and cards in 99 percent of cases, and that a mandate would add bureaucracy and uncertainty without a benefit to merchants or customers.

Two objections go beyond the principle. First, on cost: if an acceptance duty is enacted at all, the HDE says it can only come with the option of passing the costs on to the party that causes them - that is, with surcharging, which PSD2 Article 62(4) and its German transposition largely prohibit for consumer card payments today, and which the ministry's paper explicitly rules out by requiring that acceptance impose no extra cost on the customer.

Second, on scope: the HDE warns that a duty to accept a single customary method creates a customer expectation that their particular card is taken, so in practice merchants would end up accepting several international schemes rather than one cheap European one. Instead of the mandate, the association asks for cheaper digital payment procedures and the right to pass card fees on.

This is the first formal position from the association that speaks for the estate the duty is aimed at, and it reframes the file from an acceptance question into a pricing one. The ministry's paper and the HDE's answer are incompatible on exactly one clause: Berlin wants acceptance with no extra cost to the customer, and the HDE will only accept the duty if the cost can move to the customer.

Whichever way that clause is settled decides who pays for converting Germany's cash-only tail, and a surcharging carve-out would be the first breach in the German transposition of the PSD2 surcharging ban - a change that would reach far past the newly mandated merchants to every card sale in the country. The second objection is the more strategic one for acceptance economics: the ministry's European-method clause is meant to point at girocard and prospectively Wero, and the HDE is saying that in practice a mandate pulls international debit and credit into the same terminals, which is the mix that costs a German merchant most.

For acquirers, PSPs and terminal makers the addressable tail is unchanged either way, but the blended rate it accepts at is not.

• Whether the cabinet draft keeps the no-extra-cost clause or opens any surcharging option, since that is the one point the HDE has named as its condition
• Whether DEHOGA, IHA and UNITI, who signed the July letter with the HDE on scheme fees, take the same line
• Whether the ministry answers the argument that a single-method duty pulls in the international schemes by tightening the definition of a European procedure
• Whether the bill still reaches cabinet in 2026 now that the largest affected association is against it

• einzelhandel.de
• retail-news.de