Overview of Cards Domestic Switches and Card Schemes Mergers : Source Arkright

 Over the years, in more mature markets, some of the earlier domestic switches and card schemes were merges (e.g. Interbank Card Association with the establishment of Master Charge established, later rebranded into MasterCard, and the merger of BankAmericard, Barclaycard, Carte Bleue, ChargeX, Sumitomo Card and others merge to become Visa), or, later being merged into bigger schemes (e.g. Switch in the UK, Laser in Ireland, etc.). Bank switches in Asia have also been in progress, albeit slow, to merge into national infrastructure, albeit in some case this progress is slow.

Ultimately payment infrastructure is following the same expansion / fragmentation and later consolidation at stage of maturity of any other industry. Drivers for consolidation are the search for scale for operational cost reduction, the challenges of investing in innovation and ultimately the fact that these are commodity infrastructure requiring constant investment but not providing much source of differentiation to participating banks and financial institutions alike.

Needless to note that innovation on the front end and at customer interface would not be possible without an effective back-end infrastructure providing the payment processing on the back end.