Visa Europe is coming closer to agreement with European antitrust regulators over the long-running problem of transaction charges on debit and credit cards, executives indicated on Tuesday.

Peter Ayliffe, Visa Europe’s chief executive, said his company was in a “very constructive dialogue” with the European Commission and he definitely expected an agreement in 2009, although he declined to be more precise. Mr Ayliffe’s comments were considerably more positive than in the past.

The problem centres on interchange fees paid between banks that service vendors and banks servicing cardholders.

More than a year ago, regulators in Brussels found that Mastercard was breaching EU competition rules by charging excessively high interchange fees on cross-border transactions – an outcome cheered by retailers and consumer groups.

Mastercard, which claimed that the fees were vital to facilitating transactions, launched an appeal against the decision, which is still outstanding.

Competition officials stressed at the time that the Mastercard decision did not mean that all multilateral interchange fees were illegal. Nevertheless, when an exemption enjoyed by Visa also expired, it, too, became in embroiled in talks with the commission over what kind of new charging structure would be acceptable under competition rules.

Mr Ayliffe said the aim was to find a long-term solution to the dispute and that the talks centred on agreeing a core underlying business model.

The issue has much wider implications. This is partly because national competition regulators in Europe have also been investigating the legality of interchange fees on domestic transactions.

But it is also because of the EU’s desire to create a single euro payment area so that electronic payments made across the eurozone are as straightforward as those made within a single country.

Officials have been keen to encourage a European debit card payment network to rival schemes operated by Visa and Mastercard – but banks have been reluctant to commit without more regulatory clarity on the interchange fee issue.