Visa and Mastercard execs grilled by senators on ‘duopoly,’ high swipe fees

The Senate Judiciary Committee convened on Tuesday for a listening to on the alleged Visa–Mastercard “duopoly,” which committee members from each side of the aisle say has left retailers and different small companies with no skill to barter interchange charges on bank card transactions.

“That is an odd grouping. Essentially the most conservative and probably the most liberal members occur to agree that now we have to do one thing about this example,” committee chair and Democratic Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin mentioned.

Interchange charges, also called swipe charges, are percentage-based charges paid by retailers to bank card issuers every time prospects use bank cards in retail purchases. Visa and Mastercard have a mixed market cap of greater than $1 trillion, and management 80% of the market.

“In 2023 alone, Visa and Mastercard charged retailers greater than $100 billion in bank card charges, largely within the type of interchange charges,” Durbin instructed the committee.

Durbin, together with Republican Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, have co-sponsored the bipartisan Credit score Card Competitors Act, which takes intention at Visa and Mastercard’s market dominance by requiring banks with greater than $100 billion in property to supply at the very least one different fee community on their playing cards, moreover Visa and Mastercard.

“This manner, small companies would lastly have an actual selection: they will route bank card transactions on the Visa or Mastercard community and proceed to pay interchange charges that usually rank as their second or largest expense, or they may choose a decrease value various,” Durbin instructed the committee.

Visa and Mastercard, nonetheless, stand by their swipe charges.

“We think about them incentives, some folks would possibly think about them penalties. However when you can undertake new know-how that reduces the chance and takes fraud out of the system and improves streamlined processing, you then would qualify for decrease interchange charges,” mentioned Invoice Sheedy, senior advisor to Visa CEO Ryan McInerney. “It’s totally costly to problem a product and to supply fee assure and on-line customer support, zero legal responsibility. All of these issues, and plenty of extra, senator, get factored into interchange [fees].”

The executives additionally warned in opposition to the Credit score Card Competitors Act, with Sheedy claiming that it “would take away shopper management over their very own fee selections, scale back competitors, impose know-how sharing mandates and decide winners and losers by favoring sure opponents over others.”

“Why do we all know this? As a result of we have seen it earlier than,” Mastercard President of Americas Linda Kirkpatrick mentioned, in reference to the Durbin modification to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which required the Fed to restrict charges on retailers for transactions utilizing debit playing cards. “Since debit regulation took maintain, debit rewards have been eradicated, charges went up, entry to capital diminished, and competitors was stifled.”

However the present excessive bank card swipe charges for retailers translate to increased costs for customers, the Nationwide Retail Federation instructed the committee in a letter forward of the listening to. The Credit score Card Competitors Act, the retail trade’s largest commerce affiliation wrote, will ship “equity and transparency to the fee system and aid to American enterprise and customers.”

“After we consider shopper spending, bank card swipe charges usually are not the very first thing that involves thoughts, but these charges are a surprisingly giant a part of shopper spending,” Notre Dame College legislation professor Roger Alford mentioned. “Final 12 months, the common American spent $1,100 in swipe charges, greater than they spent on pets, espresso or alcohol.”

Visa and Mastercard agreed to a $30 billion settlement in March meant to scale back their swipe charges by 4 foundation factors for 3 years, however a federal choose rejected the settlement in June, saying they may afford to pay extra.

Visa can also be battling a Justice Division lawsuit filed in September. The fee community is accused of sustaining an unlawful monopoly over debit card fee networks, which has affected “the worth of practically every little thing,” in response to Legal professional Basic Merrick Garland.

Correction: This story has been up to date to appropriate the definition of interchange charges.