Credit card 'swipe fees' are out of control. The reason is lack of competition

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In Opinion: Credit card ‘swipe fees’ add up for small businesses. A lack of competition keeps them excessively high. It's time to pass the Credit Card Competition Act.

Like many other retailers across California, I wasn’t allowed to open my doors to customers during the early days of the COVD-19 pandemic. As I struggled to save my business, I immediately started reducing my costs and overhead. I let go of my staff, I stopped the weekly garbage collection and I changed the phone plans.

Swipe fees are out of control and the reason is lack of competition. San Francisco-based Visa and New York’s Mastercard, which control 80% of the market between them, set the fees charged by banks that issue their cards — the same banks that refuse to negotiate when merchants ask for a break during challenging times. They also block competition by restricting processing to their own networks. It’s no wonder swipe fees have more than doubled in the past decade.

This landmark pro-consumer legislation would require that the nation’s largest banks enable the credit cards they issue to be processed over at least two unaffiliated networks — Visa or Mastercard plus an independent network like NYCE, Star or Shazam, or even competitors like American Express and Discover. The banks would decide which two networks to enable but merchants would decide which to use.

 

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