C|C Payments Blog

Payments News Update – May 6, 2022

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Senators Grill Visa, Mastercard Execs Over Swipe Fees The Hill – May 4, 2022 Senators on Wednesday scrutinized Visa and Mastercard for raising swipe fees on merchants, costs that they say will be passed down to consumers amid surging inflation. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a longtime critic of the credit card giants, called for new...

Payments News Update - April 22, 2022

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Lawmakers Seek to Cancel Card Fee Increases Payments Dive – April 21, 2022 A bipartisan group of four lawmakers implored Visa and Mastercard on Friday to cancel credit and debit card "swipe" fee increases planned for this month, warning them about practices that could raise antitrust concerns. In an April 15 letter to the CEOs of Visa and Mastercard, the Democrats...

Mastercard’s Digital Fee Hike Means Double Trouble for Merchants

By Owen Glist As part of the annual spring ritual of interchange increases and new network fees, Mastercard has announced that it is more than doubling its “Digital Enablement Fee.”  This hefty price hike raises both the cost of digital transactions and antitrust concerns. Mastercard’s Digital Enablement Fee is essentially a tax the network imposes for “enabling” online transactions, also known as...

Payments News Update – April 7, 2022

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Debit Card Antitrust Case Against Visa Revived, With New Judge Reuters – April 5, 2022 A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday revived an antitrust case against Visa Inc over debit card services and reassigned the dispute to a different Texas federal court, after criticizing the slow pace of the litigation and questioning whether the trial judge was biased against the...

Payments News Update – March 18, 2022

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: CFPB’s Chopra Blasts Potential Card Hikes Payments Dive – March 14, 2022 The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said fee hikes by the card companies would add "insult to injury" at a time of inflation. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra minced no words Friday in a rare TV appearance, offering a critical view of the state...

Payments News Update – March 4, 2022

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Merchants Payments Coalition Launches Campaign to Fight Swipe-Fee Increase Slated for April ConvenienceStore News – March 2, 2022 The Merchants Payments Coalition (MPC) has unveiled an advertising campaign to educate Congress and other policymakers on increasing the swipe fees credit card networks and big banks charge merchants to process...

Payments News Update – February 18, 2022

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Visa Had a Monopoly on Payments at the Olympics for 36 Years. China Put an End to That Fortune – February 11, 2022 Since 1986, Visa has served as the exclusive payment service provider for the Olympic Games, complimenting cash as one of the only two ways to pay for anything at official Olympic venues. If you’re at the Olympics and need to pay with a credit...

Payments News Update – December 17, 2021

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: UK Government Outlines Plans for Regulation of Buy Now Pay Later Industry The Spectator – December 15, 2021

The buy now pay later industry has exploded in recent years, with the industry now worth $100 billion (circa £70 billion). Also known as BNPL, it is used by shoppers to delay payments on any kind of product from champagne to clothes and kitchens, and the...

Payments News Update – December 3, 2021

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: 6 Ways the EU’s Digital Markets Act Will Change Big Tech PYMNTS – November 29, 2021 The European Union’s Digital Markets Act is coming, and Big Tech will never be the same. In theory. The rules will be voted on by the EU parliament this week, but are widely expected to pass. It’s important to remember that these rules apply to companies with a market cap of...

UK Regulator Raps Schemes for Raising Fees and Concludes that Card-Acquiring Services Market “Does Not Work Well”

By Richard Pike, Simon Yeung and Andreas Killi[1] A comprehensive government review has concluded that the card-acquiring services that enable merchants in the UK to accept card payments is not working well for a significant number of merchants. The UK’s Payment Systems Regulator (PSR; the economic regulator of the payment systems industry in the UK) published its final report on its market review into...