Bipartisan legislation to reduce credit card ‘swipe fees’ expected
The legislation to address swipe fees has been championed by NACS and its members for more than two decades.
Bipartisan legislation will be introduced soon in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives that creates choice for the processing of credit card purchases, according to a story just published in The Wall Street Journal. The legislation to address swipe fees has been championed by NACS and its members for more than two decades.
The bills endorsed by NACS seek to bring long-overdue competition to the credit card market and addresses the exorbitant swipe fees paid by Americans every year.
The bills are expected to require the largest U.S. banks that issue Visa or Mastercard credit cards to allow transactions to be processed over at least two unaffiliated card payment networks—the same process that has been used for debit card transactions for more than a decade.
“Our stores compete every day for consumers’ business—as does every other business in the country. In the broken credit card market, no competition means an open invitation for these large multinational corporations to continually increase rates and to only focus on what benefits them, as opposed to the customer,” said NACS President and CEO Henry Armour.
In the United States, banks that issue Visa and Mastercard credit cards charge a swipe fee that averages 2.25% of the purchase price when the cards are processed over Visa or Mastercard’s networks. These rates are the highest in the world, seven times higher than the average rate in Europe.
Credit and debit card swipe fees have more than doubled over the past decade and are now $160.7 billion a year, according to the Nilson report, which is considered the most trusted source on statistics in the payments industry. These fees cost the average American family more than $1,000 a year.
