Accepting Cartes Bancaires in France

When a French consumer pays with a co-badged card, the transaction can clear through CB or through the international scheme. The economics differ. Under European rules the choice of routing is not supposed to be dictated to you, but exercising it requires your acquirer to support it and requires someone in your business to have asked. Merchants who have never raised the question are usually routing on whatever default their provider configured, which was not chosen with your margin in mind.

French co-badging is usually described as though the scheme arranged it. The regulation describes it the other way round.

Article 8(2) of Regulation (EU) 2015/751 provides that when entering into a contractual agreement with a payment service provider, the consumer may require two or more different payment brands on a card-based payment instrument, provided that such a service is offered by the payment service provider. Article 8(3) then constrains what may be built on top of that: any difference in treatment of issuers or acquirers in scheme rules and in rules in licensing agreements concerning co-badging of different payment brands or payment applications on a card-based payment instrument shall be objectively justified and non-discriminatory.

Read together, those two sentences change the tone of a conversation with an acquirer. The second brand on a French card is there because the cardholder was entitled to ask for it, and the rules governing how the two are treated have to survive a test of objective justification. So when a provider tells you that CB routing is not available on your account, that is a statement about their configuration and their commercial position rather than about what the regulation permits. Asking which of the two it is, in writing, is a reasonable question and a revealing one.

Payplug, Worldline, HiPay and CCV all name Cartes Bancaires among the schemes they accept, as does any acquirer serving France. The useful questions are how your co-badged volume routes today, whether you can influence it, what each route costs, and whether anyone has measured the difference across a full month of French transactions.

What you pay is set in your PSP contract, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, where interchange, scheme fees and markup are separated before anything is negotiated.

Relevant markets: France