Originally Posted by
PROACTIVE
Well Amex has the right to have higher fees and commercial VISA/Mastercard can charge up to 2%. Also they can ears trough overdraft and incidents or subsciprion fees. But i think that at the end there is no willingness for such products anymore. In France we had a period where many financial institution where issuing cobranded cards but this has come to an end with the major Fr banks taking control of competitors in the CC obranded market. Only exception in Fr has been Advanzia introducing M&M card ifew years ago and the All Visa powered by BNP. German Market seems more active with DeutscheBank and Advanzia fighting to get a slize of the CC cobranded market ( Advanzia wiith Hilton and Turkish, DeutschBank with Lufthansa). Overall ( and most than echange fees) the major problem in Europe is scale ..too many countries and no player that wants to handle it as truly unique financial market (see Advanzia wich has different cards per country, rather than 1 card with T&C translated in all countries they operate). Complicated !!
There is quite a difference between 2 and 4% in certain markets. And it's this difference that is used to provide high incentives.
If the problem was the scale, then why Koreans can have so much better cards with a population of 50M when Germans get lower incentives with a population of 85M?