| The development of bankcard industry is sure to exert profound influences on all of the Sichuan economy. Along with the electronic banking and finance in Sichuan, as the combination of modern financial and modern technology, Sichuan bankcard industry, the burgeoning industry has experienced more than 20 years’ development. The consumers have gradually been accustomed to using bankcards instead of cash payment. With the expansion of bankcard scale, Sichuan prompts foreign-funded financial institutions to plot this potential market entry. It is foreseeable that Sichuan bankcard market will be intensified.Similar to the rest of the country, as a kind of exotic, bankcard is introduced to Sichuan in the 1980s, only for deposit taking, but failed to perform Consumer Credit function. One of the main reasons is acquirers didn’t pay attention to acceptance business. With the gradual development of socio-economy and technology in Sichuan, under the guidance of policy, personal financial business gradually arisen, particularly the rapid rise of bank business, and become a place of the commercial Banking Intermediary Business.But acceptance business is always a bottleneck of the bankcard industrialization in Sichuan. Sichuan government at all levels, people’s bank of China Chengdu branch and commercial Banks began to actively expand acceptance markets. After natural growth stage, with the "Golden Card Program", eight banks in Chengdu (ICBC, ABC, CCBC, BOC, CMBC, CDCCB, CEBBANK and SPDB) established the POS-sharing model in 1997. But this model set high entry barriers to commercial bank. By the end of 2001, to reach the "314" goal, people’s bank of China Chengdu branch establish technical standards for bank card business and set up the province-wide bankcard acceptance platform. But the platform was functionally incomplete and networking restricted. At the end of 2005, China unionpay of Sichuan branch was officially established in Chengdu, undertake the network platform to improve the general functions and speed up the industrial development. This stimulated the development of the bankcard market in Sichuan. At present, the development of Sichuan bankcard industry still exist many problems, particularly on the pricing of the acceptance business. It had received important value from Sichuan government at all levels, the relevant supervisory department and the market participants. With the establishment of bankcard association of Sichuan, the bankcard market entered a new stage of standard development, prohibited excessive price competition regardless of cost. The acceptance business becomes more and more systematized and normalized on its management.Pricing has always been the key issue of the bankcard industry. It went through six different phases from a free competitive phase to a normalized phase and then to individuality. In the process, the PBC formulated relevant regulations to improve the supervisory and regulatory system and foster a fair environment for competition, such as the Interim Measures for the Administration of credit card business, Administrative Regulations on bankcard and so on.The pricing is determined through collective bargaining between an acquirer and a merchant. Improper competition between acquirers is increasing day by day, such as price reduction without taking cost into account, altered the MCC without permission. All the acquirers are active or passively involved in "price war", the way to occupy the market, which is disadvantageous to the development of bankcard industry. This paper hopes to provide references on how to avoid price war in Sichuan bankcard acquiring markets.Most researching papers analyze the situation and problems related to the bankcard industry from macro and qualitative aspects, and study the bankcard payment system in the two-sided markets, without the acquiring research. This paper tries to construct the price-determined model, properly summarizes some main influences on price and presents some strategies for solve the problem of excessive price competition. |
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