Visa likely to follow MasterCard down mobile payment fee lane

With MasterCard already laying plans to begin extracting more fees from payments made through digital wallets like PayPal, it would be illogical for Visa not to do the same.

That's how Visa Chief Executive Charlie Scharf sees it, judging by comments he made during the Barclays Emerging Payments Forum on Wednesday.

"I think it is totally appropriate to do that," Scharf said, as reported by Reuters.

There are already plenty of fees involves in PayPal transactions, so surely one more can't hurt?

Think again

Reuters reported that PayPal's profitability has suffered for exactly this reason. More fees from Visa could harm the eBay-owned network even further.

That won't stop MasterCard from adding new fees in June, especially given that as of February, the credit firm was getting set to roll out its own digital payments network in the form of MasterCard MasterPass.

With PayPal moving further and further out of digital space and into the real world, companies like Visa and MasterCard may be feeling the need to encroach even further on the digital side.

And PayPal isn't the only digital wallet network being affected, with Google Wallet, Square and others in the mix as well.

Google's rumored physical Google Wallet card is no doubt adding to the pressure. Hell, Square is built on physical card readers.

"We are always thinking about those relationships and they have changed," Scharf said. "And if they changed enough that we think it warrants us to change something with us, we will do that."