Company Sign On Request: Credit Card Competition Act

The PPA is asking all members to consider adding their business name to a multi-industry letter to Congress expressing support for the Credit Card Competition Act. CLICK HERE to view the letter and add your company name. PPA, NACS, EMA and other industry groups supports this legislation because main street businesses like fuel retailers and convenience stores thrive on competition, and the credit card networks should too. Congress must pass this bill and bring competition to credit cards through market-based reforms.

The Issue 

The two global credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard, control about 83% of the credit card volume in the United States. Retailers have no choice but to accept these cards, meaning they are stuck with whichever network is on the card. Visa and Mastercard set the prices and the terms for the thousands on banks that issue their cards – even though the biggest fees, swipe fees. go to the bank that issued the card. Banks should compete on their swipe fee prices, but they don’t This results in swipe fees increasing year after year and U.S. merchants and consumers paying more in such fees than the rest of the world. The market is clearly broken.

The Credit Card Competition Act is a Market-Based Solution

The Credit Card Competition Aet (S. 1838 / H.R. 3881) was introduced by Senators Roger Marshall (R-KS), Dick Durbin (D-IL), J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Peter Welch (D-VT) in the Senate and Congressmen Lance Gooden (R-TX-5), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-18), Tom Tiffany (R-WI-7), and Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ-2) in the House. The bill would bring long-overdue competition to the credit card marketplace by creating a choice for the processing of credit card purchases. lt would 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. CMSPI, a payment consulting firm, estimates that credit card competition would save American consumers and businesses more than $16 billion per year.