Merchants
- Current card cost
- €1.77bn
- New merchant charge
- €953.29m
- Annual savings
- €812.07m
// economic simulator · v1.1.0
The price of sovereignty
Adjust the assumptions to follow merchant savings, PSP compensation and public cost per transaction. The tool now separates an inter-PSP rate from a fixed amount per payment.
Results are scenario identities built on the ECB’s 2025 card base. They forecast neither adoption nor the final legislation.L0G SIMULATOR
Who pays the bill?
Move the assumptions to track merchant savings, PSP compensation and the public cost per transaction.
Statistical baseEuro area 2025: 91.7bn card payments, worth €3.531tn.
02
Scenario results
Annual value migrated€353.07bn
Annual transactions9.17 bn
Implied average card ticket€38.5
Private chain
- MSC collected
- €953.29m
- Distributing PSP
- €571.98m
- Acquirer remainder
- €381.32m
Online MSC allocation
AcquirerDistributor
Public layer
- OPEX per transaction
- 3.49 ¢
- OPEX + amortised development
- 4.91 ¢
The individual cap applies: the online MSC is reduced to this merchant’s existing card fee.
Economic inconsistency: inter-PSP revenue exceeds the MSC collected. The acquirer’s gross remainder is negative.
A fixed fee follows the number of payments, whereas a rate follows their value. At the same average ticket, the two units can produce very different allocations.
The offline share is free at the point of payment, so its cost must be funded elsewhere in the chain.
Scenario recalculated
Formulas and scope
Observed data
The base adds both ECB 2025 half-years: €3,530,718,386,134.85 and 91,708,654,727 card payments sent in the euro area. The ECB API still marks the second half as provisional.
Adjustable assumptions
- Share of card payments migrated
- Adoption: the same share of card-payment value and count migrates to the digital euro, keeping the implied average ticket constant.
- Current card merchant fee
- Card fee: an illustrative merchant counterfactual. Presets are neither official averages nor recommendations.
- Proposed digital euro MSC
- MSC: assumed online merchant charge. Its final level is unknown.
- Inter-PSP
- Inter-PSP: internal allocation between acquirer and distributing PSP. The model separates a value-based rate from a fixed amount per transaction so the units cannot be confused.
- Fee-free offline share
- Offline: share of value and count that generates no private fee revenue in Parliament’s scenario.
- Public-cost assumptions
- Public costs: €1.3bn development and €320m a year are ECB estimates. The amortisation period remains a scenario convention.
Calculations
- Migrated value = 2025 card value × adoption.
- Migrated transactions = 2025 card count × adoption.
- Applicable MSC = the lower of proposed MSC and card fee when individual protection is enabled.
- Digital-euro charge = migrated value × online share × applicable MSC. Savings = counterfactual card cost − digital-euro charge.
- Distributor revenue = online value × inter-PSP rate, or online transactions × fixed amount. Acquirer remainder = collected MSC − distributor revenue.
- Full public cost per transaction = (annual OPEX + development ÷ amortisation) ÷ migrated transactions.
What the model does not measure
This is neither an adoption forecast, a total social-cost estimate nor a profit-and-loss account. It excludes bank, PSP and merchant implementation costs, fraud, support, tax, discounting, P2P uses and resilience value. It allocates the entire public layer to merchant payments, a deliberately conservative convention.
// private allocation
One envelope, several distributions
The MSC is total merchant revenue in the scenario. Inter-PSP compensation takes a share for the distributor. A negative acquirer remainder signals that the selected combination cannot fund the private chain.
// reproducibility
Inspect the model outside the interface
The static model.json file exposes variables, defaults, units, bounds, formulas and primary sources. The CSV button exports the displayed scenario.