Brussels, 2019-12-16

Since 16 December 2019, all consumers and businesses in non-euro countries will be able to benefit equally from low-cost cross-border payments.

Thanks to the new EU rules, euro payments in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Sweden and the Czech Republic will now be processed at the same price as domestic payments. When a Polish consumer wants to transfer euros abroad, they now pay the same charges as fora domestic transfer, because cross-border payments now cost very little or no charge at all. Executive Vice-President Vladis Dombrovskis, responsible for "Business in the service of the people", stressed that "this is a positive and concrete example of how the single market can bring real benefits to European consumers".

The EU Commission will closely monitor the application of these rules and work closely with the relevant national authorities. The next step will be additional rules in April 2020 that will allow EU consumers to compare currency conversion charges when they pay by cards in another EU currency.

Background

The European Commission has already proposed on 28 March 2018 to amend the existing EU regulation on cross-border payments (924/2009). These proposals come from the Consumer Financial Services Action Plan published in March 2017. After the Parliament and Council reached an agreement, Regulation (EU) 2019/518 was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 29 March 2019.

More information can be found here.