Retail Payments

Each year, the Central Bank collects data on fees charged for payment services and for the use of Iceland‘s main payment instruments. Every two to three years, the Bank also assesses the social costs of retail payments. The goals of data collection are to shed light on the costs of using various payment instruments and payment services and to assess whether a particular payment instrument or payment service is more cost-effective than others for society. The results are published in the Bank‘s Cost of Retail Payments report. In 2016 and 2018, the Bank assessed the social cost of payment processing and published the results in its Financial Infrastructure reports, whose publication has since been discontinued.