American Banker: Durbin Revives Credit Card Swipe Fee Bill With Added Support
Merchant lobbying groups cheered the move, claiming the legislation would end an unfair monopoly Visa and Mastercard enjoy in setting interchange rates. Merchants pay more than 2% of each transaction in fees, amounting to more than $11 billion a year that merchants and consumers absorb, the Merchants Payments Coalition, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit representing a broad swath of online and in-store merchants, said in a Wednesday press release.
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Convenience Store News: Federal Lawmakers Poised to Address Credit Card Swipe Fees
NACS is a founding member and serves on the Executive Committee of the Merchants Payments Coalition, a coalition comprising NACS and other merchant groups representing brick-and-mortar and online retailers.
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MarketWatch: Visa, Mastercard Stocks Dip as Congress Takes Renewed Aim at Credit Card Fees
Mike Beal, the chief financial of family-owned grocery Ball Foods, said that “small businesses pay the highest swipe fee rates, we don’t have the resources to navigate complex credit card contracts, and we have absolutely no leverage to negotiate as these fees rise higher every year,” according to a release from the Merchants Payments Coalition.
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CSP Daily News: Swipe Fee Legislation Reintroduced to Spur Competition, Tame Rising Fees
“We look forward to them passing this bipartisan, pro-Main Street legislation this year,” said Doug Kantor, an executive committee member at Merchants Payments Coalition and general counsel for the National Association of Convenience Stores. “The sooner the credit-card industry can be made to compete the better.”
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Fox Business: New Credit Card Bill Targeting Visa-Mastercard 'Duopoly' Triggers Lobbying Onslaught
Last year, merchants were charged $126.4 billion in credit card swipe fees, which was 20% higher than what they paid in 2021. According to the Merchants Payments Coalition, this means the average family had to shell out an additional $1,024 on items due to higher credit and debit card swipe fees even before inflation.
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CSP Daily News: U.S. C-Store Merchants Call for Action on Swipe Fees
Visa and Mastercard’s market dominance in the U.S. hasn’t been regulated to the same extent as in other nations, where laws or agreements to hold the line on the interchange fees, (MPC Executive Committee member Doug) Kantor said. “So everywhere has been able to reduce the fees more than the United States. We have the highest fees in the world,” Kantor told CSP Daily News Thursday.
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Credit Unions Today: Just Look North for Reasons to Reduce Swipe Fees, Merchants Group Says
The Merchants Payments Coalition continues to keep up the pressure behind its efforts to get the Credit Card Competition Act enacted, with its latest argument being that an agreement in Canada to lower credit card “swipe” fees shows that the fees could be reduced in the United States as well.
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NACS Daily: Canadian Deal Shows Swipe Fees Could be Lowered in U.S.
“If Visa and Mastercard can afford to reduce their swipe fees in Canada, there’s no reason they can’t do the same here,” said Doug Kantor, NACS general counsel and MPC executive committee member. “U.S. merchants and their customers pay twice as much as Canadians and seven times as much as Europeans. It doesn’t make sense that the country that invented the credit card and is home to the two largest card networks on the planet has the highest swipe fees in the industrialized world."
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CStore Decisions: Swipe Fee Deal to Save Canadian Retailers $1 Billion Over Five Years
“If Visa and Mastercard can afford to reduce their swipe fees in Canada, there’s no reason they can’t do the same here,” MPC Executive Committee member and National Association of Convenience Stores General Counsel Doug Kantor said.
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Digital Transactions: Lower Interchange Deal Struck in Canada
The MPC, a trade group for merchants that advocates for lower interchange rates, was quick to suggest something similar could be done in the United States with a call to action by Congress to step in.
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