The Reserve Bank will define payment card acceptance costs more narrowly than in its current standard in regulations that will underpin the Government's new ban on excessive surcharging.Treasurer Scott Morrison yesterday introduced legislation giving the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission power to enforce the RBA's rules.The Competition and Consumer Amendment (Payment Surcharges) Bill 2015 gives the ACCC power to gather information from parties involved in the payments process, issue infringement notices and impose fines.The Treasurer said: "The ban on surcharging will work in tandem with the RBA Australian Payments System Board standards that will set the permitted surcharge for payments."The RBA yesterday outlined changes to its current surcharging standard, which was introduced in 2013.Under the current rules, merchants have a right to recover their card acceptance costs through a surcharge and card scheme operators have the right to set scheme rules that limit surcharging to reasonable cost.The "reasonable cost of acceptance" includes the merchant service fee charged by the merchant's acquiring bank and some additional costs. The RBA listed additional costs under five headings: other costs payable to acquirers, including fees for the rental and maintenance of payment card terminals; costs payable to other payment system service providers, such as gateway and switching fees; merchants' own costs related to card acceptance, such as the purchase and maintenance of their own card acceptance infrastructure; fraud costs related to acceptance, such as equipment required to mitigate fraud; and any fixed equipment, systems or development costs not captured under the other headings.For a number of reasons, including the difficulty of working with the RBA's convoluted definition of "reasonable cost", the 2013 standard was not effective.The RBA said in a media release yesterday that card acceptance costs would be limited to the merchant service fee and other fees paid to the merchant's bank  (or other payment service provider).Statements provided by banks to merchants will be required to contain easy-to-understand information on the average cost of acceptance for each payment method, which will constitute the maximum permissible surcharge if the merchant chooses to surcharge.The RBA said it would work with the ACCC and the industry on cost disclosure issues.The move to ban excessive surcharging was a recommendation of the Financial System Inquiry but the FSI's solution has been ignored. The FSI recommended a three-tiered approach: low cost system providers, such as systems subject to debit interchange fee caps, should have the right to prevent merchants from surcharging; medium cost providers, such as systems subject to credit interchange fee caps, should be required to apply surcharge limits set by the PSB; and higher cost, unregulated system providers should continue to apply reasonable cost recovery rules.The industry rejected this approach as too complex.