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Durbin letter presents warning to Visa, MasterCard
By Sam Craine on Jun 1st, 2010
While consumers may be dealing with credit card debt, merchants who accept cards as payments face their own fees.
However, an amendment to the Senate's recently passed financial reform bill will give merchants the ability to set minimum requirements for purchases made with debit or credit cards. At issue are interchange fees, which are charged to stores by networks like Visa and MasterCard.
Dick Durbin, the Illinois senator who introduced the amendment, recently penned a letter to the two companies telling them to not introduce measures that may hurt smaller banks and card issuers.
"Further, I would caution you not to collude with your largest member banks to change your fees and rules in an effort to protect the big banks against competition from smaller card-issuing banks," Durbin wrote.
While merchants deal with fees associated with credit cards, consumers have also had to deal with higher interest rates. However, some of these people may consider debt consolidation, which can present lower interest rates and make bills easier to pay by cutting down the number of statements an accountholder receives.
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