After years of pressure, credit card giants Visa and Mastercard have agreed to a deal to cap swipe fees in an antitrust settlement that could end up saving merchants some $30 billion.
The antitrust class-action settlement was announced on Tuesday morning and is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. It includes all merchants who accepted Visa or Mastercard debit or credit cards in the United States from late 2020 to the present, according to a press release.
The settlement will save merchants at least $29.79 billion in savings over a five-year period following the approval of the deal over agreed-upon caps and rollbacks on credit card processing fees, known as “swipe fees.”
“This settlement is the culmination of eight years of hard-fought litigation and detailed, painstaking negotiations,” said Steve Shadowen, a co-lead counsel. “It provides comprehensive market-based solutions to too-high swipe fees, while providing immediate fee relief to merchants as they make these new competitive tools work for them.”
The news release from the plaintiffs accused Visa and Mastercard of a “relentless upward spiral” for swipe fees over the last quarter of a century and said that this settlement applies three separate “brakes” to swipe fees in the U.S.
First, the antitrust deal involves Visa and Mastercard rolling back the posted swipe fee of every merchant by at least four basis points for at least three years. For context, a basis point is one-hundredth of a percent (0.01%).
Second, for the next two years, the credit card giants agreed not to raise the swipe fees of any merchant above the posted rates that existed as of the end of last year.
And finally, Visa and Mastercard agreed that for the next seven years, the average effective systemwide swipe fee for the credit cards must be at least seven basis points below the current average rate.
The settlement in question is a very long time coming. The deal stems from a lawsuit originally filed in 2005 in which Visa and Mastercard were accused of forcing U.S. merchants to pay excessive swipe fees to accept the credit cards, which they alleged was in violation of antitrust laws.
Such credit card swipe fees usually amount to about 2% of a purchase, according to Bloomberg. The fees totaled a whopping $100 billion just last year. The banks tethered to Visa and Mastercard are the biggest collectors of that extra revenue and pass much of that down to customers in the form of credit card rewards programs.
Additionally, as part of the settlement, merchants get more flexibility at the point of sale. They will now be able to charge customers for the use of a Visa or Mastercard credit card and adjust prices to conform to the cost of different credit cards.
“By negotiating directly with merchants, we have reached a settlement with meaningful concessions that address true pain points small businesses have identified,” said Kim Lawrence, Visa’s president of North America. “Importantly, we are making these concessions while also maintaining the safety, security, innovation, protections, rewards and access to credit that are so important to millions of Americans and to our economy.”
But Doug Kantor, general counsel at the National Association of Convenience Stores, said the settlement “does not reflect a good deal for merchants at all.”
“It’s temporary relief, and then back to business as usual and Visa and Mastercard can just raise everybody’s fees all over again,” he told the Washington Examiner. “That doesn’t move the ball forward.”
The battle has also been playing out in Congress. Last year, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced the Credit Card Competition Act, which mandates that the largest credit card-issuing banks offer a choice of at least two networks, one of which would have to be a network other than Visa and Mastercard.
Kantor said he thinks the settlement shows the need for legislation like the Durbin-Marshall bill. He said it demonstrates that litigation won’t provide the relief merchants are seeking.
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On the other hand, the Electronic Payments Coalition, which represents banks and card networks, used the settlement to praise the deal and attack the pending credit card legislation. EPC Executive Chairman Richard Hunt called on Congress to scrap the bill in the wake of the settlement.
“The Durbin-Marshall bill has had no debate, no legitimate hearing and continues to be unnecessary,” he said. “Ultimately, the agreement helps small businesses more than a haphazard, experimental piece of legislation that only benefits the largest corporate mega-stores ever would.”
