Korean card firms paid W200b in fees to Visa, MasterCard

South Korea’s credit card firms paid more than 200 billion won ($186.7 million) in fees to the world’s two largest payment-services providers Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. last year, financial data showed Monday.

According to the data, local card firms gave a commission of 124.6 billion won to the two foreign card companies for the use of their card names in 2013. They also paid them 29.5 billion won in fees in return for using their global networks and 50.1 billion won in card issuance and maintenance fees.

The data was compiled by the Financial Supervisory Service and submitted to Kim Young-hwan, representative of the opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy, for parliamentary inspection.

It was the first time that the annual amount of fees paid by the local card companies to the global payment-service providers surpassed the 200 billion won mark.

The payments have been on a sharp rise from 139.5 billion won in 2010, 164.4 billion won in 2011 and 188.8 billion won in 2012. (Yonhap)