Article 4 — Interoperability

1. Payment schemes to be used by PSPs for the purposes of carrying out credit transfers and direct debits shall comply with the following conditions: (a) their rules are the same for national and cross-border credit transfer transactions within the Union and similarly for national and cross-border direct debit transactions within the Union; and (b) the participants in the payment scheme represent a majority of PSPs within a majority of Member States, and constitute a majority of PSPs within the Union, taking into account only PSPs that provide credit transfers or direct debits respectively. For the purposes of point (b) of the first subparagraph, where neither the payer nor the payee is a consumer, only Member States where such services are made available by PSPs and only PSPs providing such services shall be taken into account. 2. The operator or, in the absence of a formal operator, the participants of a retail payment system within the Union shall ensure that their payment system is technically interoperable with other retail payment systems within the Union through the use of standards developed by international or European standardisation bodies. In addition, they shall not adopt business rules that restrict interoperability with other retail payment systems within the Union. Payment systems designated under Directive 98/26/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 May 1998 on settlement finality in payment and securities settlement systems (14) shall only be obliged to ensure technical interoperability with other payment systems designated under the same Directive. 3. The processing of credit transfers and direct debits shall not be hindered by technical obstacles. 4. The payment scheme owner or, where there is no formal payment scheme owner, the leading participant of a new entrant retail payment scheme which has participants in at least eight Member States, may apply to the competent authorities in the Member State where the payment scheme owner or leading participant is located for a temporary exemption from the conditions set out in point (b) of the first subparagraph of paragraph 1. Those competent authorities may grant, after consulting the competent authorities in the other Member States where the new entrant payment scheme has a participant, the Commission and the ECB, such an exemption for a maximum of 3 years. Those competent authorities shall base their decision on the potential of the new entrant payment scheme to develop into a fully fledged pan-European payment scheme and its contribution to improving competition or promoting innovation. 5. With the exception of payment services benefiting from a waiver under Article 16(4), this Article shall be effective by 1 February 2014.

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Source: EUR-Lex CELLAR · retrieved 2026-08-27