The European Commission said it hopes to complete an inquiry into MasterCard Inc and rule on the credit card group's interchange fee payments network "as soon as possible".
At the start of this month, Kroes said she envisaged that the inquiry would be completed by the end of the year.
At the end of January, the commission completed its banking and payment card sector inquiry and said that while it would not abolish interchange fees -- paid by the merchant's bank to the cardholder's bank to cover the costs of operating debit and credit card payment networks -- it would continue to assess the legality of current fee levels.
At the time of the completion of the commission's sector inquiry in January, MasterCard said that while it welcomed the EU executive's decision not to abolish the fees, the inquiry's conclusions still left the system in a "cloud of uncertainty".
As the Jan 1 2008 deadline to implement a Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) for the European banking system approaches, MasterCard said it needed a "clear green light" from the commission on the interchange issue, "not a yellow one".
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