Pricing

Merchants in the United States paid $224 billion in card-acceptance costs in 2023, the highest toll for merchants in any country in the world, according to payment consultancy CMSPI’s State of the Industry Report. Interchange fees alone accounted for $143 billion of that total. Since 2009, U.S. merchants’ like-for-like payment …

Adyen NV early Monday began launching what its calls an intelligent-routing service for debit cards intended to reduce merchants’ debit-acceptance costs and increase authorizations for purchases. The service, which enables Adyen to choose which network to route transactions over, was developed primarily in response to the Federal Reserve’s 2023 statement …

MyKaarma, a payments service for automobile dealers, said its surcharge service, myKaarma Surcharge, has achieved compliance with Honest Pricing Laws that have been enacted in several states, including California and New York. Surcharging allows merchants to add their cost of credit card acceptance to a bill when a customer presents a credit …

The U.S. Department of Transportation is looking into airline rewards programs with an eye on protecting consumers from potential unfair, deceptive, or anticompetitive practices, the department says. Many consumers use cobranded airline credit cards to earn points in these programs, though the DOT’s focus is on rewards, not on card-issuing …

High card-acceptance fees are the root cause for why some merchants are charging consumers for cash back at the point-of-sale, a service merchants have historically provided consumers even though customers can make purchases with their debit cards at no charge, says the Merchants Payment Coalition. Driving the trend is that …

Retailers providing cash-back services at the point of sale fill a void for many consumers who may live in so-called banking deserts, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says in a new report on the service. Some, however, charge a fee for that access, along with other banking hurdles. The Cash-back …

Merchants want lower interchange. In their Shangri-la, interchange would be negative, meaning merchants would be paid to accept credit and debit cards. This is not unknown in the real world. For example, Australia’s national debit network for many years had negative interchange. Merchants want to be able to freely surcharge …

Several organizations representing banks and credit unions filed a lawsuit late Thursday challenging Illinois’s Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, which was signed into law June 7. The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, was brought by the Illinois Bankers Association, The American Bankers Association, …

While merchants, like consumers, love credit and debit cards, they don’t like having to pay to accept them. It’s human nature to want to pay less for products and services, no matter how good they are. To reduce payment-acceptance fees, merchants have brought a battery of antitrust lawsuits against Mastercard …

Merchants were granted a second extension late Tuesday for filing claims against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. in their ongoing class-action lawsuit against the two networks over interchange costs. U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of New York Margo K. Brodie, who is presiding over the case, moved …