Excise Duty Decree: the obligation to accept electronic money, including via apps and wallets, is now law

The Excise Duty Decree – approved by the Senate at its third reading with 79 votes in favour and 51 against – strengthens the obligation to accept electronic money, extending it to include, in addition to traditional debit and credit cards, payment apps, smartphones, smartwatches and digital wallets. Consequently, the penalty – set at a fixed amount of 30 euros plus 4 per cent of the value of the declined transaction – will also be extended to include payment apps. The measure contained in the decree has been welcomed by digital payment networks such as Satispay: the  platform, which originated in Piedmont, has announced that from September it will return to zero fees for transactions under ten euros.

Once the ten-euro threshold is exceeded, however, Satispay’s fees will stand at 0.95 per cent. And that’s not all. Special terms will also continue to apply to merchants operating in sectors characterised by lower profit margins and selling monopoly goods, such as tobacconists, newsagents and petrol station operators.

Satispay, which has been operating since 2015 and boasts a community of 6.5 million users and over 450,000 affiliated businesses, has stated that it is ready “to offer its full support to merchants” and that it has “anticipated this change” by working to “make digital payments accessible to everyone”: indeed, the platform ‘has never required any effort on the part of the merchant, working with any bank and any device already in use – smartphones, tablets, computers or cash registers – without dedicated POS terminals, without new hardware, without activation fees or monthly charges, with takings credited the following day’.

Alberto Dalmasso, co-founder and CEO of Satispay, explains that ‘when we entered the market, partly thanks to the Payment Services Directive, it was clear to us that the institutions’ aim was to foster greater competition by encouraging the emergence of European leaders. Over the past few years, we have helped to build a new culture of electronic payments in Italia and have established one of the most widespread alternative networks in Europe.”

With the strengthening of the obligation to accept electronic money introduced by the Excise Duty Decree, Dalmasso continues, “a decisive step is being taken, in line with the original spirit of the European directive, which will bring greater competition and better services for merchants and consumers. For many merchants, a new obligation may seem like a burden: our commitment is to turn it into an opportunity’.