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Hi Peter. whether Retail is competitive or not is in my opinion not the issue here. The whole basis of the arguments to the Regulators by the BRC and other Retailer bodies in Europe was that interchange savings from the caps they persuaded the Regulators to implement woulod be passed back to the consumer, yet the Reagultors in their naivety did not ask for this to be tracked. The consumer is actually losing out as loyalty programmes are either scrapped or ,adjusted, by banks because of the revenue loss from interchange cuts. The Reagulator should have implemented a tracking mechanis as part of the interchange cap introduction. The big retailers have been shown to have had a benefit (see various articles by Payment Systems Europe) but have released no data on how much has been passed back to the consumer suggesting a tracking mechanism was never implemented

Do the British Retail Consortium have a tracking mechanism so they can clarify how much of the interchange savings they have made from the caps has been passed back to consumers? I look forward to that information.

Even in the branches that are remaining, there are fewer and fewer staff to actually serve customers. There seem more staff swanning around asking if you are paying in a cheque and they then point you to the new paying in machines in Lloyds branches. So far I have tried to use them 4 times and they have failed 4 times because they could not read the writing or numbers on the cheque or they were corporate cheques that 'rarely work' in those machines according to the staff. One was actually from the Lloyds Clearing Centre in Birmingham. You could not make it up