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Visa, Mastercard Mull Increasing Fees For Processing Transactions: Report (reuters.com)
Visa and Mastercard, the two biggest U.S. card networks, are preparing to increase certain fees levied on U.S. merchants for processing transactions that will kick in this April, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: Some of the changes relate to so-called interchange fees, the report said. Interchange fees are what merchants pay to banks when consumers use a credit or a debit card to make a purchase from their store. Fees that Mastercard and Visa charge financial institutions, such as banks, for processing card payments on behalf of merchants are also set to increase, the report said.
Definitely not collusion
When you saturate the market to the point where you can't grow anymore, you got to raise prices. Their cost of doing business hasn't gone up, so there's no real reason to raise prices other than to appease Wall Street.
Google or Amazon could end you. It could happen fast and bad. All that's needed is a nudge, and raising merchant fees could be just that.
They should be lowering fees as an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
What needs to happen is that merchants start offering anywhere 1-3% discounts for cash or debit card purchases. Only then we will see a decline in the use of credit cards.
Kinda hard to pay with it online. I offered to scan or fax it, but oddly most companies refused.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm sure with the state of technology and all, the costs to keep track of these records are rising and the credit card companies are just keeping up.
The reason they can do this is because the cost is being hidden from the consumer. Do you think someone would sign up for getting "2% cashback" if they were paying 2.1% more per transaction? Nope and yet that is what is happening. The cause of this is that stores are contractually required to eat the cost of the transaction fees and thus increase the price of goods to compensate. The result is that everyone is subsidizing the transaction fees, even if they pay cash which completely eliminates any desire to compete with lower transaction fees. Pass a law legally compelling stores to isolate the cost of the transaction from the goods themselves and the transaction fees will plummet because then credit card companies will have to compete for consumers.
If you are in favor the free market then you cannot be in favor of the actions of credit card companies.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Doesn't matter. Retail will still in turn raise their prices to compensate, which will effect everyone.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
If Apple and Google both decided to support the same stable cryptocurrency - e.g., USDC - Venmo would be out of business in a year or two and Visa and MC would be frantic.
This, merchants will just pass the cost increase on to the customer. All customers, since it would be too much work to offer a discount to cash customers. In fact it should be the other way around, card users incur a fee - but that would be bad for business - best to just hide it in higher prices for every one like they already do. As a cash customer, this stinks.
This is an obvious case where government intervention is required. To limit the fees the oligopoly can charge.
It has been done in Australia and other places. Visa and Mastercard threatened to leave the country. They didn't.
Google has been focusing their payment system efforts on the 3rd world. Google pay has a monopoly in just about every region where banks can't be counted on to keep their assets secured or where the currency value fluctuates as bad as cryptocurrency. Why challenge establish organizations when you can simply own regions elsewhere.
Last I checked, echecks lacked the 3% take but retained an interchange fee on the order of 30 cents, calling it the automated clearinghouse (ACH) processing fee.
And this processing fee still makes echecks impractical for, say, buying access to 1 article on an ad-free website. Instead, to make up for the cost, websites require readers to buy a whole month or maybe a pack of 100 article views at once, even if 29 days or 97 page views will go unused.
Why caffeinate yourself with a $5 Starbucks coffee when you can buy a 500 mL bottle of Mtn Dew for 50 cents?
Sooner US market gets pissed off enough at visa/mc duopoly with their in your face brazen market collusion and security nightmare 'take' rather than 'give' models and instead move to something half way rational like SWIFT instant payments the better off we will all be.