From the 31st, Reduced Fee Rates Applied to Ease Burden on Small Franchisees

[Asia Economy Reporter Song Hwajeong] Starting from the 31st, the revised preferential fee rates will be applied, which is expected to reduce the fee burden on small merchants.

On the 26th, the Financial Services Commission announced that as a follow-up measure to the card fee reform plan announced on December 31 of last year, the Specialized Credit Finance Business Supervision Regulations have been amended, and the revised preferential fee rates (changed from 0.8~1.6% to 0.5~1.5%) will be applied from the 31st.

The revised preferential fee rates apply to 2,878,000 credit card merchants with annual sales of 3 billion KRW or less (96.2% of all merchants), 1,329,000 sub-merchants under payment gateway (PG) companies (92.2% of all PG sub-merchants), and 165,000 individual taxi operators using transportation settlement service providers (99.8% of all taxi operators).

For approximately 182,000 merchants who newly became credit card merchants in the second half of last year and were subject to general merchant fee rates but have now been confirmed as small and medium merchants based on sales, the difference between the card fees already paid and the preferential fees will be refunded. The estimated amount is about 49.2 billion KRW (approximately 270,000 KRW per merchant). For example, a merchant who opened on July 1 last year and had credit card sales of 140 million KRW over 7 months (annualized sales of 240 million KRW) and paid a card fee of 2.2% can receive a refund of about 1.96 million KRW through this refund measure.