Visa And MasterCard Postpone Swipe Fee Increases Another Year
In response to pleas from retailers and pressure from Congress, Visa and Mastercard announced that because of the pandemic they are again delaying planned fee increases. The delayed increases have been moved to April 2022.
Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) sent a letter to VISA and MasterCard urging the companies to refrain from increasing swipe fees by $1.2 billion scheduled to take effect in April.
An increase in processing fees could be especially hard for convenience stores now that cash has become a less popular payment option with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Just as increased vaccination efforts start to give our Main Street business hope for a summer reopening, your companies propose slamming struggling merchants, and by extension consumers, with fee increases,” Durbin and Welch said in the letter. “Raising your fees would undermine efforts to help the economy recover and further reduce Americans’ purchasing power.”
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