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Walmart and Target among 1,600 merchants calling for credit-card fee law, says WSJ
Merchants such as Target Corp. [s] and Walmart Inc. undefined signed on to a letter asking Congress to pass a law that would require options for the routing of credit-card transactions over alternative networks, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, and Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas Republican, who introduced such a bill back in July, said that alternate routing options would increase competition and lead to lower swipe fees when people use many Visa Inc. undefined and Mastercard Inc. undefined credit cards. “Swipe fees for credit cards are higher in the United States than anywhere else in the industrialized world-more than seven times as high as Europe,” a group of more than 1,600 merchants said in their letter, the Journal reported Wednesday. Debit cards already carry a requirement for routing options in most cases. Visa Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu addressed the proposed legislation at a Goldman Sachs conference earlier this week, saying that there is already “a ton of competition” in the credit-card business and that reductions in interchange fees as a result of any new laws could impact the rewards landscape for consumers.
