The CCCA Goes Into Limbo As a ‘Clean’ GENIUS Bill Advances 

Efforts to attach the Durbin-Marshall Amendment to the proposed GENIUS Act, a bill to regulate stablecoins, have failed. The Senate moved late Wednesday to advance the stablecoin bill without any amendments.

Efforts to attach the amendment, which is the latest version of the Credit Card Competition Act, to the GENIUS Act began last month as CCCA sponsors saw attaching the legislation to a banking-related bill as a promising avenue for passage. The GENIUS Act is the first major piece of banking legislation to come to the Senate floor in the three years since the CCCA was first introduced.

Despite being unsuccessful in attaching the Durbin Marshall amendment to the GENIUS Act, supporters of the amendment remain optimistic it can be reintroduced, given growing support for the legislation.

“Support for the amendment has clearly grown to a point where the payments industry was looking to duck a vote on this one,” says Doug Kantor, a Merchants Payment Coalition executive committee member and general counsel for the National Association of Convenience Stores.

Kantor cited recent endorsements of the legislation from the Teamsters Union, as well as from labor unions in the retail and food-service sectors, as signs of growing public support for the Durbin Marshall amendment. Kantor adds this support for the legislation is proof that the time for “credit card swipe-fee reform has come.”

Swipe fees drive up prices by nearly $1,200 a year for the average family, according to MPC estimates.

In addition, the MPC cites figures from payment consultancy CMSPI indicating that, had the CCCA passed, merchants could have seen more than $17 billion in interchange relief in 2024, up from $16.4 billion in 2023. Credit card fees accounted for more than 70% of the $224 billion in card fees paid by merchants in 2023, while credit card spending accounts for an estimated 40% of total U.S. spending, according to CMSPI.

The CCCA would require that credit card issuers offer merchants a choice of networks beyond Visa and Mastercard. Greater network choice would increase competition, which would lead to lower network pricing, CCCA supporters argue.

Although the CCCA will not advance as part of the GENIUS Act, payments experts don’t expect the bill’s sponsors to stop trying to pass the legislation.

“Senator Durbin would love for the CCCA to be the capstone of his career. It has an unusual bipartisan coalition of passionate supporters,” says Eric Grover, principal at Intrepid Ventures, by email. “It’s been positioned as pro-competition and good for merchants, and is understood to be bad for Visa, Mastercard, and goliath bank issuers like Chase, Capital One, Citi, and Bank of America, all of which the CCCA’s supporters have pilloried and none of which in the current environment is politically sympathetic.”

One reason for the payments industry’s success in keeping the CCCA from coming to a vote is the industry’s diligence in lobbying against the bill. “Unlike with the Durbin Amendment, the payments industry hasn’t been asleep at the switch,” Grover says. “It’s lobbied vigorously on Capitol Hill against the CCCA, and conducted an aggressive multi-channel campaign warning the public of the enormous harm it would do.”

Nevertheless, Grover notes that the 80-year-old Durbin is a “crafty and effective legislator” who will work to reintroduce the legislation before he retires from office.