Bitcoin Prevents American Express, Visa And MasterCard From Ripping-Off America's Businesses And Consumers

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Bitcoin Prevents American Express, Visa And MasterCard From Ripping-Off America's Businesses And Consumers

This is exactly who we need alternative forms of payment like Dwolla, Bitcoin, etc.
Monty Henry, Owner

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  has sued Visa Inc.  for more than $5 billion, claiming the card network charged unreasonably high fees when the retailer's customers paid with plastic.

Retailers are charged fees set by Visa and other card networks every time a customer pays with a credit or debit card. In its suit, Wal-Mart alleges that the way Visa set those "swipe fees" violated antitrust regulations and generated more than $350 billion for card issuers over nine years, in part at the expense of the retailer and its customers.

Visa declined to comment. The company has repeatedly denied that its fees are anticompetitive.

The lawsuit, filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, extends a long-running battle between the retailer and the payments network. Wal-Mart helped win a $3 billion class-action settlement with Visa and MasterCard Inc. in 2003 over the card networks' requirement that merchants who accepted their credit cards must also accept their debit cards.

Interchange fees, the industry term for card-swipe fees, have been another major point of contention between the two camps. The fees are set by Visa and other card networks and collected by card-issuing banks like J.P. Morgan Chase And Co. Retailers have argued that the fees had been set too high due to a lack of competition with the two payment industry giants.





"The anticompetitive conduct of Visa and the banks forced Wal-Mart to raise retail prices paid by its customers and/or reduce retail services provided to its customers as a means of offsetting some of the artificially inflated Interchange Fees," the company said. "As a result, Wal-Mart's retail sales were below what they would have been otherwise."

Wal-Mart also took a shot against Visa over payment card security. Data breaches last year at Target Corp., Neiman Marcus and others have drawn attention to the country's slow adoption of card technology that uses computer chips and PIN numbers and is seen as less susceptible to fraud than the current system of magnetic stripes.

"Wal-Mart was further harmed by anti-innovation conduct on the part of Visa and the banks, such as perpetuating the use of fraud-prone magnetic stripe system in the U.S. and the continued use of signature authentication despite knowledge that PIN authentication is more secure, a fact Visa has acknowledged repeatedly," it said in the suit.

Visa and MasterCard have been pushing merchants and banks to adopt the technology, arguing it could significantly reduce the impact of data breaches. Both companies have set an October 2015 deadline for merchants to upgrade to the technology or face increased liability for future data breaches.


Some banking groups have previously accused merchants of dragging their feet on adopting the technology.

According to a January 2007 poll by Harris Interactive, 32% of the public had heard of the interchange fee; once explained to them, 91% said Congress "should compel credit card companies to better inform consumers" about the fee.

Controversy: Price-fixing

Regulators in several countries have questioned the collective determination of interchange rates and fees as potential examples of price-fixing. Merchant groups in particular, including the U.S.-based Merchants Payments Coalition and Merchant Bill of Rights, also claim that interchange fees are much higher than necessary, pointing to the fact that even though technology and efficiency has improved, interchange fees have more than doubled in the last 10 years. Issuing banks argue that reduced interchange fees would result in increased costs for cardholders, and reduce their ability to satisfy rewards on cards already issued. The Merchants Payments Coalition argues that consumers pay more than they should because of "hidden" interchange fees and that reducing these fees would result in lower retail prices.

By Region: United States 

Merchant lawsuits claim that interchange fees in the U.S. are out of line with falling technology costs and similar fees charged outside the United States, resulting in higher prices, lower profits and harm to the consumer. The lawsuits allege that these high fees represent collusion and price fixing among the bank card networks and their card issuing banks, in violation of antitrust laws. Bank card networks disagree, claiming interchange fees represent an effort to balance incentives to issuing banks to issue more cards with better rewards against the need to bring an optimum number of card-accepting merchants into their credit card systems. They also claim that the interchange fees bring consumer benefits such as more rewards, reduced fraud, lower interest rates and system innovations.

Legislation And Congressional Investigations

Senate hearings in the United States have focused on the secrecy surrounding interchange fee schedules and card operating rules. In 2006 Visa and MasterCard both released some fee schedules and summary reports of their card rules, though pressure continues for them to release the full documents. In January 2007, Senate Banking committee chairman Chris Dodd cited interchange fees at a hearing on credit card industry practices and again in March the fees were criticized by Sen. Norm Coleman. In January 2007, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates cited high interchange fees as a significant reason Microsoft believes it can be competitive in online micropayments.

In March 2007, MasterCard announced it was changing its rate structure, splitting the lower, "basic" tier for credit cards into two new tiers. The Wall Street Journal reported that the document outlining the shift "makes it difficult to determine if the new rates, on average, are rising." MasterCard spokesman Joshua Peirez said the new structure "allows us to have a more sophisticated way to break up our credit card portfolio," while National Retail Federation general counsel Mallory Duncan said, "They are pricing each tier at the absolute most they can so they can maximize their income."

On July 19, 2007 the House Judiciary Committee antitrust task force held the first hearing to study the specific issue of interchange fees. NRF's Duncan testified, as did representatives from the credit card industry. Subcommittee chairman John Conyers, leading the panel, said, "While I come into the hearing with an open mind, I do believe the burden of the proof lies with the credit card companies to reassure Congress that increasing interchange fees are not harming merchants and ultimately consumers."

Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Chris Cannon (R-UT) introduced the "Credit Card Fair Fee Act" on March 6, 2008, which would create a panel of judges, appointed by the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission to oversee interchange fees.

On October 1, 2010, the Durbin Amendment came into effect as a last minute addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. As a result, banks have begun to limit the incentives offered with their checking account products, and some have announced that they would begin to charge their customers a fee for the use of the cards.

Anti-Trust Litigation

In October 2010, Visa and MasterCard reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in an antitrust case focused on the issue of competitiveness in the interchange market. The companies agreed to allow merchants displaying their logos to decline certain types of cards, or to offer consumers discounts for using cheaper cards.

European Union

In 2002 the European Commission exempted Visa’s multilateral interchange fees from Article 81 of the EC Treaty that prohibits anti-competitive arrangements. However, this exemption has expired on December 31, 2007. In the United Kingdom, MasterCard has reduced its interchange fees while it is under investigation by the Office of Fair Trading.

In January 2007, the European Commission issued the results of a two-year inquiry into the retail banking sector. The report focuses on payment cards and interchange fees. Upon publishing the report, Commissioner Neelie Kroes said the "present level of interchange fees in many of the schemes we have examined does not seem justified." The report called for further study of the issue.

On December 19, 2007, the European Commission issued a decision prohibiting MasterCard's multilateral interchange fee for cross-border payment card transactions with MasterCard and Maestro branded debit and consumer credit cards. The Commission concluded that this fee violated Article 81 of the EC Treaty that prohibits anti-competitive agreements. MasterCard has appealed the Commission's decision before the EU Court of First Instance; while the appeal is pending MasterCard has temporarily repealed its multilateral interchange fees.

On March 26, 2008, the European Commission opened an investigation into Visa's multilateral interchange fees for cross-border transactions within the EEA as well as into the "Honor All Cards" rule (under which merchants are required to accept all valid Visa-branded cards).

The antitrust authorities of EU Member States other than the United Kingdom are also investigating MasterCard's and Visa's interchange fees. For example, on January 4, 2007, the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection fined twenty banks a total of PLN 164 million (about $56 million) for jointly setting MasterCard's and Visa's interchange fees.

Australia and New Zealand

In 2003, the Reserve Bank of Australia required that interchange fees be dramatically reduced, from about 0.95% of the transaction to approximately 0.5%. One notable result has been the reduced use of reward cards and increased use of debit cards. Australia also removed the "no surcharge" rule, a policy established by credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard to prevent merchants from charging a credit card usage fee to the cardholder. A surcharge would mitigate or even exceed the merchant discount paid by a merchant, but would also make the cardholder more reluctant to use the card as the method of payment. Australia has also made changes to the interchange rates on debit cards, and has considered abolishing interchange fees altogether.

As of November 2006, New Zealand is considering similar actions, following a Commerce Commission lawsuit alleging price-fixing by Visa and MasterCard. In New Zealand, merchants pay a 1.8% fee on every credit card transaction.

Monty Henry, Owner

Additional Resources:

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The Creature From Jekyll Island: This Blog And Video Playlist Explains Why The U.S. Financial System is Corrupt and How It Came To Be That Way


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Online Privacy Tools and Tips

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