Interchanges and pricing of card payment systems.

Summary The ownership and use of payment instruments have grown considerably in industrialized countries. The success of payment cards can be explained by the presence of interbank payment systems, such as "Visa" or "MasterCard", which organize the interactions between the cardholder's bank, the issuer, and the merchant's bank, the acquirer. This thesis focuses on a particular cost allocation mechanism practiced by payment platforms: interchanges. Interchange is the subsidy paid by the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank each time a consumer uses his payment card. By lowering the price paid by the consumer for a transaction, the interchanges contribute to encouraging the use of payment cards at the expense of cash. The thesis is structured around two issues. The first problem concerns the effect of interchanges on the investments of card payment system actors. The second problematic deals with the impact of interchanges on the substitution between payment cards and cash. In the first chapter of the thesis, we conduct an empirical analysis of the payment card industry in France and in Europe. In the second chapter of the thesis, we build a theoretical model to present the results of the interchanges literature. In the third chapter, we address the question of the influence of interchanges on banks' investments to improve the quality of the payment service, and on merchants' investments to bypass the platform by issuing proprietary cards. In the fourth chapter of the thesis, we discuss the impact of interchanges on the substitution mechanisms between card and cash.