Senate to hold hearing on high credit card fees

Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) will hold his latest hearing on the problem of high credit card fees this Tuesday (11-19) at 10 a.m. The fees are controlled by a cartel of just two companies-Visa and Mastercard-and are harmful both to small merchants and their consumer customers.

The Senate Judiciary Committee release is: http://”Breaking the Visa-Mastercard Duopoly: Bringing Competition and Lower Fees to the Credit Card System.

A PIRG-supported bill from Chairman Durbin has bipartisan co-sponsors, the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). It is designed to regulate Visa and Mastercard’s unfair dominance over the credit card market. We first testified on the problem in 2006. In our most recent testimony before the committee in 2022:

“All consumers pay more at the store and more at the pump because of unfair, nonnegotiable, nontransparent merchant interchange fees imposed by the card networks.”

Our PIRG release went on to explain that the practices of these two massive credit card companies  practices impose the greatest hardship on the most vulnerable consumers—

“The millions of American consumers without credit cards or banking relationships.” These consumers, as cash customers, subsidize card usage by paying inflated prices for many goods and services. These prices are inflated by the billions of dollars of anticompetitive interchange fees, which are used to subsidize rewards programs, promotions, and riskier credit underwriting for credit card users.”

Competition is harmed when just a few companies control a market. Consumers pay too much for other goods and services, too. PIRG is fighting high prices and unfair competition.