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Since 1 October 2026, the most a Moroccan card issuer may take from a domestic card payment is 0.50% of the transaction, down from 0.65%. The change has been reported as a cut in what merchants pay to accept cards.
The decision does not say that. Interchange is one line inside the merchant’s commission, and Bank Al-Maghrib’s text expects acquirers to pass the reduction through for two categories only: payments to government, and payments at a narrowly defined class of small independent shop. Every other merchant keeps what its contract says until it renegotiates.
That is the more useful news, because the renegotiation is now real: card acquiring in Morocco stopped being a single-firm market this year.
What is happening?
Decision n°265/W/2026, signed by Wali Abdellatif Jouahri on 6 July 2026 and in force on 1 October 2026, replaces Decision n°244/W/2024 of 20 September 2024, which set the first domestic interchange ceiling at 0.65% (Bank Al-Maghrib, 6 July 2026).
Article 3 sets three ceilings, all excluding tax and all on the value of the transaction:
| Transaction | Interchange ceiling |
|---|---|
| e-gov payments | 0.15% |
| payments at a commerçant de proximité | 0.15% |
| all other payment operations | 0.50% |
Three things sit outside the decision entirely (Article 2): ATM withdrawals, payments on cards issued under three-party schemes, and payments made with cards issued abroad.
The definitions matter more than the rates. A commerçant de proximité is an independent physical retail outlet whose annual turnover does not exceed MAD 500,000 under auto-entrepreneur status, or MAD 2,000,000 for a commercial, industrial or craft activity carried on individually under the contribution professionnelle unique. Outlets attached to large and medium-sized distribution, integrated or franchised shops, and legal persons are excluded — a small SARL does not qualify, whatever its turnover.
Article 3 then says the effect of the reduction a vocation à être répercuté — is intended to be passed on — by acquirers to merchant commissions for e-gov and proximity commerce operations. The general cut from 0.65% to 0.50% carries no equivalent sentence.
Article 4 adds two obligations that apply to everyone: the merchant commission may never be charged to the payer, on any acceptance channel, and the acquirer’s contract must set out the conditions applying to interchange, acquisition and operating fees. Acquirers must also report their interchange table and their merchant commissions to Bank Al-Maghrib. APEP, the professional association of payment institutions, put the arithmetic plainly on 21 October 2026: the merchant commission covers interchange paid to the card issuer, processing costs, card-network fees and the acquirer’s own margin, so the caps limit one component, not the total (H24Info, La Vie éco, both 21 October 2026).
The reason a merchant can act on this at all is structural. Under Conseil de la concurrence decision n°152/2024 of 31 October 2024, the Centre Monétique Interbancaire was barred from soliciting new merchants and had to transfer its whole merchant portfolio — private contracts by 31 January 2026, public contracts by 30 April 2026. The joint communiqué of 10 July 2026 calls the result a transition “from a mono-acquirer model to a multi-acquirer architecture” (Conseil de la concurrence, 10 July 2026); pilot-phase reporting named Attijari Payment, Damane Cash, M2T, Saham Paiements and CDM Pay among the first acquirers to launch (Le360, 21 September 2025).
One thing remains unknown, and it is the number that matters most: Bank Al-Maghrib collects the commissions acquirers charge but does not publish them, so no official series exists for the all-in rate a Moroccan merchant pays, and whether the old 0.65% ceiling bound in practice is not established either.
Why it matters economically
Bank Al-Maghrib’s annual report on financial market infrastructures and payment means, published on 21 October 2026, sizes the base. In 2025, card payments including ATM and online payments reached 230.1 million operations worth MAD 70.8 billion, up about 20% in number and 12% in value. Terminal payments rose from 153.3 to 184.5 million operations, worth MAD 58.6 billion against MAD 52.2 billion. E-commerce payments rose 16% in number to 44.8 million operations and 10% in value to MAD 12.1 billion. Cash still dominates: 450 million withdrawals worth MAD 460 billion, and currency in circulation ended 2025 at MAD 513 billion, around 30% of GDP (Bank Al-Maghrib, 21 October 2026).
Two pieces of arithmetic follow, on stated assumptions rather than measurement.
At market level, the cut is worth tens of millions of dirhams a year at most. Fifteen basis points on the whole 2025 terminal volume of MAD 58.6 billion is about MAD 88 million — an upper bound, and a generous one, since the cap does not touch foreign-issued cards and not every domestic transaction was previously priced at the ceiling.
At merchant level, the cut is small and the contract is not. An illustrative retailer taking MAD 4 million a year on cards saves about MAD 6,000 if the full 15 basis points reach it, against roughly MAD 20,000 for every 50 basis points of total commission. The variable worth managing is the whole rate, not the component the regulator capped.
The last number is for tourism-facing businesses. International cards in Morocco accounted for 55.5 million operations worth MAD 55.7 billion in 2025, up 28% in number. None of it is covered by the cap.
What it means for African businesses
This is a Moroccan instrument and applies only in Morocco. It does not describe North Africa, and nothing in it transfers to other markets.
Within Morocco it sorts merchants into three groups. A shop that genuinely meets the proximité definition should see a reduction arrive without asking — and should check that it has. A business collecting payments on behalf of the state is in the same position. Everyone else — companies, franchises, anything inside organised distribution, and every business taking foreign cards or online payments — has to go and get it.
The pattern is familiar. West Africa’s monetary union capped mobile money transfer fees from 2 November and wrote its rule for transfers between natural persons: a ceiling aimed at a consumer or small-trader segment, with businesses left to their provider’s tariff. Reading the scope article before the headline is becoming standard discipline across the markets we work in.
One provision does apply to every Moroccan merchant and is easy to get wrong: the commission may not be passed to the customer. A card surcharge at the till, or a “card fee” line at online checkout, is not permitted on any channel.
Technology and AI implications
Most of what helps here is unglamorous. The merchant category code an acquirer assigns determines which ceiling applies, so a shop that believes it qualifies at 0.15% but is coded otherwise pays 0.50% and will not notice unless someone reads the settlement file. Capturing the fee charged on each transaction from that file and carrying it into the record of the sale turns acceptance cost from an annual guess into a measured number per channel, per card type and per acquirer. That is an integration task, not an analytics project.
Running more than one acquirer — now possible, and the obvious lever online — makes reconciliation harder before it makes it cheaper: settlement arrives in different formats, on different cycles, with different fee breakdowns. Our view is that no e-commerce or retail business should add a second acquirer before it can reconcile the first automatically.
AI does not help with the thing that decides the outcome. It will not lower interchange, cannot read a contract you have not obtained, and has no bearing on whether your acquirer passes a reduction on; those come from the contract and from competitive pressure. The narrow use is in the plumbing — normalising settlement statements from several acquirers into one schema, every figure checked against the acquirer’s own totals rather than trusted. Document processing with verification, not decision-making.
Practical business implications
Five questions, answerable this month.
- What is your all-in rate, by channel? Divide last quarter’s total deductions by card turnover — separately for in-store, online, domestic and foreign cards. The four numbers usually differ more than expected.
- Does your contract itemise the three components? Article 4 requires it to set out interchange, acquisition and operating conditions. If yours shows one blended rate, ask for the breakdown in writing: you cannot negotiate what you cannot see.
- Is your MCC right, and do you actually qualify at 0.15%? Check the turnover thresholds and the legal-person exclusion honestly before claiming the rate.
- What share of your card turnover is on foreign-issued cards? For hotels, restaurants and tour operators this can be the larger half, and the cap does not reach it.
- Have you quoted a second acquirer? A quote costs nothing and establishes what your current rate is worth.
For a business still deriving its acceptance cost from bank statements at month end, the prior problem is the record, not the rate — the one described in why growing businesses outgrow spreadsheets.
RevenueStack perspective
Our reading is that the decision’s real economic content is not the 15 basis points. It is the reporting obligation and the contract-transparency rule beside it.
Bank Al-Maghrib now receives every acquirer’s interchange table and merchant commissions. Its 2025 report says the work with market participants aims to simplify the interchange structure into “a more legible pricing model”, and records that the Fonds de Développement de l’Acceptation — a seeding mechanism for micro and small merchants — was formally established in early 2026. The regulator chose visibility and competition over capping the merchant’s total cost, and that shifts the work onto the merchant.
It also sets the sequence. A capped component in a market with one supplier is an administered price; the same cap with several suppliers is a floor under a negotiation. Morocco moved from the first to the second across 2025 and 2026, and the merchants who gain will be those able to state, with evidence, what they pay now and what they are offered. That is a systems question before a commercial one — which is how we approach this kind of change: find where the economics sit, then build the record that makes them visible.
The honest caution is scale. For a merchant with modest card turnover the exercise is worth a few thousand dirhams a year, and the time is better spent on the revenue still arriving in cash. The MAD 513 billion in circulation says that is the larger prize.
Conclusion
Morocco’s interchange ceiling fell to 0.50% on 1 October 2026, and to 0.15% for government payments and for a narrowly defined class of small independent shop. Only those two categories are expected to see the reduction automatically. For every other merchant the decision does something less automatic but worth more: it requires the acquirer to itemise what it charges, requires that charge to be reported to the central bank, and lands in a market with competing acquirers to quote against. The implication is to stop treating card acceptance as a fixed cost of trading and start treating it as a contract — one you can read, measure per channel, and put out to tender.
Sources
- Décision Réglementaire n°265/W/2026 relative aux frais d'interchange monétique domestique — Bank Al-Maghrib, 2026-07-06
- Rapport annuel sur les infrastructures de marchés financiers et les moyens de paiement — Exercice 2025 — Bank Al-Maghrib, 2026-10-21
- Communiqué conjoint du Conseil de la concurrence et de Bank Al-Maghrib — Conseil de la concurrence du Maroc, 2026-07-10
- Paiements par carte : l'APEP apporte des précisions sur les nouveaux plafonds d'interchange — H24Info, 2026-10-21
- Frais d'interchange : l'APEP apporte des précisions — La Vie éco (Mehdi Raihani), 2026-10-21
- Comment la fin du monopole du CMI propulse le paiement électronique au Maroc — Le360 (Lahcen Oudoud), 2025-09-21
- Rapport annuel sur les infrastructures de marchés financiers et les moyens de paiement (page de publication) — Bank Al-Maghrib, 2026-10-21