💳 Domestic card schemes around the world

What a domestic card scheme is, and what it is not

A domestic card scheme is a card payment system whose rules, brand, and infrastructure are governed from within the market it serves. It has three components. The first is a rulebook that sets who may issue, who may acquire, who guarantees what, and who pays what to whom. The second is a brand, displayed on the card and at the point of acceptance. The third is a technical platform for switching and clearing. What makes a scheme “domestic” is its governance: it belongs to local banks, an interbank association, or the country’s central bank, not to Visa Inc. or Mastercard Incorporated. Size has nothing to do with it. Of the 146 countries covered by the Paypedia registry, more than 60 still run a card rail of this kind.

Each origin produces a different operating model. A scheme owned by its member banks negotiates pricing with them; a central bank scheme imposes it. A scheme born of a geopolitical constraint carries compliance risk for any institution that accepts it. A public policy scheme grows by mandate rather than by commercial adoption. Meeza reached 43.5 million cards in six years (Central Bank of Egypt, 2025) through public-sector salaries, subsidies, and pensions, without ever having to win over a consumer.

• Who governs it? Banks, an economic interest grouping, a central bank, a listed company. This determines who you negotiate with and how fast the rules change.
• Does it cover card-not-present? Many schemes born at the point of sale never built an e-commerce rail and leave that traffic to the international co-badge.
• Is it mandatory? Mandatory domestic routing (Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam) and a purely commercial option make for two very different integration projects.
• What does it really cost? Capped interchange, a flat fee, no interchange at all, or a regulated MSC: all four models exist somewhere in the world.
• Do cardholders see its brand? In Mexico, Carnet rides on the Prosa switch more than on its own brand, which consumers barely recognize. A scheme can be structural and invisible.

The landscape: who operates where, and at what scale

The table below lists the schemes actually found in production, with their operator, launch year, and the latest sourced size figure available. Units change from row to row because operators don’t publish the same metrics. Some report transaction counts, others cards issued, and others publish nothing at all. There is no consistent global database of domestic scheme volumes. Any two markets compared from these sources are therefore almost always measured on two different definitions, and the gap you see may come entirely from the metric chosen.

How co-badging works: two brands, one card

Co-badging means placing a local brand and an international brand on the same card, each tied to a separate network. It is the near-universal fix for a limitation of domestic schemes: their cards work only inside the country and are useless when traveling, and often in e-commerce too. Each transaction runs over one network or the other. The choice is made from the EMV applications on the chip, each identified by an AID (Application Identifier), not from the brands printed on the card.

6F  FCI Template
 84  2PAY.SYS.DDF01          contactless payment directory name
 A5  FCI Proprietary Template
  BF0C  FCI Issuer Discretionary Data
   61  Directory Entry #1
    4F  <domestic scheme AID>         local application
    50  <local brand label>
    87  01                            priority 1 = preferred candidate
   61  Directory Entry #2
    4F  A0000000041010                Debit Mastercard (international co-badge)
    50  MASTERCARD
    87  02                            priority 2

How to read it: the card offers two applications. The terminal keeps
only those whose AID it knows. If the terminal is not certified for the
domestic scheme, entry #1 drops out of the candidate list and the
transaction goes over the international network, without anyone
ever having decided it.

• Standard EMV co-badge. Two applications on one chip, one card, one visible PAN. This is the model used by girocard, Bancontact, CB, PagoBANCOMAT, mada, and Jaywan (co-badged with Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, and Discover).
• Two instruments on one card. In Canada, cards carry Interac and, separately, Visa Debit or Debit Mastercard for international use and e-commerce. These are two distinct applications, not a co-badge as the EU regulation defines it. The distinction is more than semantic: it explains why Canada’s 2024 interchange cuts applied only to credit.
• Negotiated acceptance co-badge. Sri Lanka’s National Card Scheme (2019) is co-badged directly with JCB by LankaClear: low domestic fees, with international acceptance provided by the partner. Bangladesh’s TakaPay (2023, Bangladesh Bank) has announced the same setup with RuPay for India–Bangladesh flows.
• No co-badge. PROSTIR is available in a UnionPay co-badged version, but Mir and BELKART no longer have a viable international partner, so their cards are, in practice, purely domestic.

Who chooses the network: five incompatible regulatory regimes

On a co-badged card, the network used is the result of a decision, and the local regime determines who makes it. That party changes radically from one market to the next: depending on the country, it is the cardholder, the merchant, the acquirer, or the regulator. Payment teams expanding abroad often carry over the regime of their home market. A routing architecture built for one regime then turns out to be illegal or unworkable in another.

The European and Australian models give two opposite answers to the same problem. Europe protects consumer choice at the cost of suboptimal routing for the merchant. Australia puts the merchant in control, on the view that cardholders don’t care which network is used. The two regimes are mutually exclusive: Article 8 leaves the European merchant only a preselection that the customer can override, whereas least-cost routing gives the merchant the actual choice of network.

• Ask the acquirer for the actual routing split by brand, not just total volume. It is the only metric that exposes the leak.
• Check how the payment page actually renders in e-commerce: the domestic brand must be shown, and preselected wherever local law allows.
• Audit the wallet flow separately: the route a token takes is not necessarily the route the physical card takes.
• In markets with mandatory routing, plan local certification as a project milestone, not a contractual formality.

Local interchange: four economic models, not one

Interchange is the fee the acquirer pays the issuer on every card transaction. Cost is a domestic scheme’s main selling point, and “cheaper” covers entirely different legal mechanisms. The first is an ad valorem cap, set as a percentage of the transaction value: the European approach. The second is a flat-fee cap, the US approach. The third is no interchange at all, as in Norway and, historically, Canada. The fourth is an end-to-end cap on the merchant service charge, as in Saudi Arabia. India is a separate case: the price of acceptance there has been set at zero by law.

India shows the limits of the “domestic scheme = cheaper” argument. MDR is the total fee a merchant pays on a card transaction. By setting it to zero on RuPay debit and UPI, the government made acceptance free for merchants and, in the same stroke, wiped out the business model for acquiring on those instruments. Acquirers now rebuild their margin on credit, value-added services, and international cards. Charging an MDR within that scope is an offense.

Why they survive against Visa and Mastercard

A domestic scheme survives if it keeps a share of its market’s card volume even though Visa and Mastercard are accepted there. The schemes that hold on occupy a position the global networks cannot replicate without undermining their own model in their other markets. That position rests on price, a regulatory mandate, the service provided, or resilience. Loyalty to a national brand is not enough to keep a scheme alive without one of these supports.

A newer driver has joined these: exports. Through NPCI International Payments Limited, NPCI now sells the RuPay/UPI architecture to other countries’ central banks, in addition to promoting acceptance of its own cards. JCB built its presence outside Asia on a reciprocal alliance with Discover Global Network, a partnership that turned 20 in 2025. Himyan expanded from Qatar to Kuwait (December 18, 2025) and then to Bahrain (June 2026). Verve has launched in Kenya. These schemes are becoming infrastructure providers in markets other than their own.

What kills them: how schemes disappear

A domestic scheme disappears through a recognizable sequence spread over several years. It misses the card-not-present channel, then loses its co-badging partner, then watches issuance dry up. Closure is formalized only at the end, as a routine rationalization. Abrupt shutdowns are rare.

• The card-not-present blind spot. A scheme born at the point of sale that never built an e-commerce rail automatically leaves growth to the international co-badge. This is girocard’s structural weakness, and Bancontact is the exact counterexample, with 78% of Belgian online transactions (BPC, 2026).
• Dependence on the co-badge. When the international partner withdraws its product, as happened with Maestro in 2023, the domestic scheme discovers that its acceptance abroad was never its own.
• Obsolescence by substitution. J-Debit (1999, JEPPO) is technically still live in Japan but has been displaced by internationally branded debit cards and QR payments: a scheme can be alive and unused.
• Issuance failure. The PROSTIR case: accepted everywhere, issued nowhere.
• Consolidation by processors. In the US, the consolidation of PIN debit networks under Fiserv (Accel, STAR) and FIS (NYCE, Culiance) has left few truly independent networks. Capital One’s acquisition of Discover, completed on May 18, 2025, for $35.3 billion, extends this vertical integration.

The new wave: 15 years of sovereign schemes

Between 2012 and 2026, some 15 national card rails were launched, almost all at a central bank’s initiative. Over the same period, Western Europe lost several of its schemes. Everywhere, these projects pursue the same three goals: saving foreign exchange, data sovereignty, and financial inclusion.

These launches follow a common playbook, regardless of the technology chosen. Issuance is seeded through government procurement and social benefits, creating a cardholder base that does not depend on market demand. Acceptance is then imposed on existing terminals by regulation. International reach comes last, through co-badging negotiated with a partner network. AfriGO already reports more than one million cards issued and more than NGN 70 billion in transactions in 2025, with acceptance at more than 16,000 ATMs and about 70% of the country’s POS terminals (NIBSS, 2025).

Operating: what to enable, and what breaks

In many of the markets in the table below, enabling the domestic scheme determines whether you can accept payments at all. A card that carries only the local brand cannot be accepted by a merchant whose acquirer has not enabled that scheme, which shuts out part of the cardholder base. The merchant gets no usable error message.

• Up-to-date 8-digit BIN tables. Identifying the issuing scheme relies on ranges that change, and the move from 6-digit to 8-digit BINs (ISO/IEC 7812) made part of the legacy tables obsolete. A misclassified range gets misrouted.
• Terminal certification for each scheme. The terminal must know the local AID; otherwise the domestic application drops out of the candidate list. The failure is invisible, but the cost is real.
• Local integration protocols. Terminal-to-acquirer messaging is not universal: Ashrait is Israel’s integration standard, VCCS is Vietnam’s chip standard, and several markets impose their own specification. Plan a dedicated development workstream, not a configuration change.
• Local acquirer or directly connected PSP. Access to domestic schemes often requires an acquirer licensed in the country; some international PSPs connect directly to local payment methods, which saves signing one contract per country.
• Local clearing and settlement cycles. Many domestic schemes use daily deferred net settlement in the national RTGS system; value dates and cutoffs have nothing in common with those of the global networks.
• Single point of failure. In single-switch markets (Shva in Israel, SIMO in Mozambique, KNET in Kuwait), when the switch goes down, card payments go down nationwide. A continuity plan cannot stop at a second acquirer.

A domestic scheme should be judged on its issuance, its real cost, and its legal status, not on its international profile. Three cases in this guide show why. TROY was marginal two years ago and now carries a quarter of Turkish card volume by value. Hipercard was a heavyweight in Brazil’s Northeast and has approved nothing since July 2025. PROSTIR is accepted everywhere in Ukraine and does not exist commercially. They point to three mirror-image mistakes: ignoring a scheme whose issuance is growing, keeping a closed scheme in your contracts, and mistaking acceptance for usage. A standard acquirer report reveals none of them, because it shows total volume without the routing split by brand.