Visa, Mastercard Prepare To Raise Credit-Card Fees 225
Visa and Mastercard are planning to increase fees that many merchants pay when they accept customers' credit cards. From a report: The fee increases are scheduled to start in October and April, according to people familiar with the matter and documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Many of the increases are for online purchases. The changes could result in merchants paying an additional $502 million annually in fees, according to CMSPI, a consulting company that works with merchants.
Increases in network fees will make up a little more than half of that revenue, CMSPI estimated. The rest will come from increases in interchange fees, also called swipe fees. Merchants pay these fees when shoppers pay via credit card. The economy of interchange fees is largely hidden from shoppers. But the fees are a major source of contention between the card networks and merchants large and small, from giant online retailers to corner coffee shops. U.S. merchants paid an estimated $93 billion in Visa and Mastercard credit-card fees last year, according to the Nilson Report, an industry publication. That was up from about $33 billion in 2012. Merchants pass along at least some of that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices. More small businesses have started offering discounts to shoppers who pay by debit card, cash or check.
Increases in network fees will make up a little more than half of that revenue, CMSPI estimated. The rest will come from increases in interchange fees, also called swipe fees. Merchants pay these fees when shoppers pay via credit card. The economy of interchange fees is largely hidden from shoppers. But the fees are a major source of contention between the card networks and merchants large and small, from giant online retailers to corner coffee shops. U.S. merchants paid an estimated $93 billion in Visa and Mastercard credit-card fees last year, according to the Nilson Report, an industry publication. That was up from about $33 billion in 2012. Merchants pass along at least some of that cost to consumers in the form of higher prices. More small businesses have started offering discounts to shoppers who pay by debit card, cash or check.
I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of hiding the fee, I increase it so customers know. 98% of them pay with ACH transfer. 1% pay with checks, Zelle, and the like. If the processors raise the fee, I will too. My ACH fees for the year come out to less than 1%, and I don't have to spend hours each month dealing with checks.
For businesses that accept credit cards, I use credit because I know they built the cost into the price. I may as well get my 1%+ back in points or cash.
then the tip is 4% lower just wait for cash end (Score:2)
then the tip is 4% lower just wait for cash end.
when cashless comes in the fees can go up even more.
Re:then the tip is 4% lower just wait for cash end (Score:5, Interesting)
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Not having cash in the store deters certain types of criminals that want to rob a till. What we really need is more competition in the credit card space and businesses who make the added fee known to the consumer. I'll swit
Re:then the tip is 4% lower just wait for cash end (Score:5, Informative)
Cash isn't free. It costs money to handle and bank, there is fraud and theft. It's slower than contactless and even chip & PIN, so you need more staff/self service checkouts.
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In my experience, cash is usually faster. Store the other week had one cashier where the card reader was down, that line was flying compared to the other 2 where people were using cards. Too often it takes a few tries to find a card that actually doesn't get rejected if using credit cards and even debit's seem to routinely get rejected it seems.
It is just too easy to spend more then you have with a card without realizing then no funds. Of course stores love people spending more then they can afford, at leas
Re:then the tip is 4% lower just wait for cash end (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe US card payment technology is just really crappy. In Europe it's far faster. Most of the time you just tap the card or hold your phone near the payment terminal, it beeps, and a few seconds layer your receipt is ready.
It very rarely fails, especially if you use Google Pay or Apple Pay. Conversely, paying in cash requires finding the right change and the cashier has to sort it into the coin and note tray.
Sounds like you need to improve your banking tech. From what I hear it's decades behind the rest of the world for some reason.
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Cash isn't free. It costs money to handle and bank, there is fraud and theft. It's slower than contactless and even chip & PIN, so you need more staff/self service checkouts.
No, cash isn't free. I don't think anyone suggested that it is. But the cost of handling cash is accepted as a cost of doing business, just like keeping the lights on. Shops aren't allowed to charge an extra 1% to keep the lights on inside the shop, or to run the heater in winter. They shouldn't be allowed to charge extra to accept legal tender in payment for goods.
Where I live, it is common for retailers to add a surcharge for electronic payment, usually in the range of 1-2% of the total. If they are allow
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My point was that the cost of handling cash is, or at least was, quite similar to the cost of handling card payments. I'm sure Mastercard and Visa have carefully calibrated this increase to make it not really any cheaper to take cash.
Cash is usually cheaper than credit cards.
In Canada, the absolute cheapest for merchants is debit cards, followed by cash. Credit cards are the most expensive. But they are also the most convenient (allows international customers, you get some perks).
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If you don't want to use paper cash, don't use paper cash. Don't push for the rest of us to suffer through a cashless existence with cash restricted to small purchases.
I think people with abusive spouses should be able to go on a date with someone else without a record existing for their spouse. I think people should be able to buy pot without being caught, even if it's illegal. I think that women should be able to pay cash for an abortion without there being a record. I should be able to tip in cash wi
Re:I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:5, Informative)
Contracts with VISA/Mastercard usually prevent you from charging more to pay with the credit card.
You can however offer a discount for those who pay cash.
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Contracts with VISA/Mastercard usually prevent you from charging more to pay with the credit card.
You can however offer a discount for those who pay cash.
I've always found it odd that Americans insist that prices are better displayed without tax, but seem OK with the credit card fee built in. If anything I'd like to know how much of my money went to middlemen more than I care about how much goes to the taxman.
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I never understood that subtle difference. Isn't the result the same -- it costs more to pay with a credit card? Are we talking about how you are allowed to phrase it?
"Discount for doing X" sounds better than "Surcharge for doing Y" even if the final result is the same.
Marketing 101
Radical honesty FTW! (Score:2)
Think all taxes should be advertised too. How else can people change their behavior in the free market? They're purposely disconnecting the price from what we pay, in time. That's how you break conditioning.
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Think all taxes should be advertised too.
Same. This is why corporate taxes should be eliminated. Those taxes are passed to consumers, employees and investors, but no one can tell how much is being paid by whom. They're also bad in that it's easy for politicians to increase taxes by levying them on corporations, because to voters it looks like free money. They should be banned, and all taxes should be levied (progressively) on individuals because that's where they land anyway and voters should know how much they're paying.
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Taxes are not guaranteed to be 100% pass-through. Your idea would also sacrifice Pigouvian taxes intended to dissuade "bads" like pollution.
Re:I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:5, Insightful)
This is ass-backwards.
Customers should only pay with credit, because they are actually protected from scams and false charges. You pay with direct bank payments, and you are never seeing that money again. If some fraudster gets your bank account and routing number, they will empty your account in seconds. They just need to find some place hired by teens who ignore ACH warnings. Cause most people who aren't directly in receivables don't understand what the ACH warnings are.
It's not like Australia, where they actually got their banking system setup so you can't drains a bank account by knowing someone's account number.
Here's the big problem with US-style direct-deposit style systems, there is no verification, anywhere. You give some company your banking account information, and they have it FOREVER. You should not be giving ANYONE your bank account information, for any reason unless you are directly employed by them.
Now there is another option here, you can pay directly from your bank, this is ultimately the safest option, short of fat-fingering the payment amount. Once you set it up correctly for a payee, you never have to worry about paying the wrong company.
For everything else, use the credit card. The store/website is charging you that 4% credit card markup, even when you pay by check anyway, so just always pay by card unless they offer you a discount up front and you're willing to take that risk.
Re:I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:5, Informative)
a) not new term. Term is generally 50 years old. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
b) Automated Clearing House. i.e. the nightly transfer of monies between banks. If you pay your credit card via them withdrawing money from your bank account [and you're in the US], it probably occurred via ACH. ACH allows either push or pull.
Re: I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:2, Troll)
It's pretty amazing how he doesn't know anything about anything. He's always posting about how he has never heard of things that have been around for decades, and are trivial to find with Google...
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Maybe he's just annoyed at a post that uses an acronym without first defining it. I had some supervisors at a document-rich job that would become highly annoyed if you did that. The 1st use of an acronym in a document should spell out what it stands for. Otherwise, it becomes jargon that only those "in the know" can read.
I didn't know what ACH stands for, but did know it had to do with my credit card and bank transfers and such because I would see it repeatedly on my debit card statements. Nice to k
Re: I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:2)
https://www.nerdwallet.com/art... [nerdwallet.com]
Re:I charge 4% for credit cards (Score:4)
What the hell is an ACH transfer?
It's an electronic debit/credit (check/deposit), usually preformed through a bank (or anyone participating). If you've ever used your bank's "bill pay" feature to pay a bill electronically, or gotten a direct deposit, you've used ACH. It's more secure and much faster than using paper checks/deposits. See: Automated Clearing House [wikipedia.org] and ACH Network [wikipedia.org].
Not sustainable (Score:5, Insightful)
When you charge a % of sales, and you keep raising your prices, eventually you will be at 100%.
And why do they need to raise their prices anyway? Exactly what costs of theirs have increased that would not be covered already since their model is a % of sales. Inflation gives them an automatic increase in revenue!
Evil bastards.
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What do you expect of capitalism? How will their investors get any return as of today's investment if they keep revenue the same on a constant-currency basis? Rent-based companies like Visa just have few other ways of increasing returns. This is not a surprise at all.
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10% is not sustainable for a lot of merchants; that is 100% of their profit margins (or more). After 3% you would see a significant backlash; current fees are under 2% for most.
There is a benefit to having less/no cash on hand for a merchant, but that benefit likely tops out around 1.5% of fees for someone with less than $5k in daily transactions.
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10% is not sustainable for a lot of merchants; that is 100% of their profit margins (or more). After 3% you would see a significant backlash; current fees are under 2% for most.
There is a benefit to having less/no cash on hand for a merchant, but that benefit likely tops out around 1.5% of fees for someone with less than $5k in daily transactions.
Whether 10% is bearable for merchants depends on how desperate the merchant is. Small merchants on Amazon are willing to pay half [gizmodo.com] of their revenue to Amazon because they don't have an alternative other than just quitting. Big nationwide retailers can negotiate with Visa and Mastercard (maybe), but smaller merchants can't. If cash works, great, but if it doesn't then not paying the Visa/MC tax means going out of business.
Visa/MC are trying their best to bleed the merchants without killing them.
Re:Not sustainable (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that the fees apply to mostly online merchants. I think this is the area where online merchants don't really have much of an option - what, are you going to ask people to order online then send you a money order through the post office?
Remember, that was how online shopping was done in the 90s when SSL wasn't common, and it was how eBay was done until X(.com) introduced Paypal that allowed random people to send money via credit cards to each other. X.com later renamed themselves to Paypal.
No one is going to do it - order online and then send a cheque in the mail? Or money order? Or cash? I mean, it would revive the postal service, but I think too many people want their 2-day shipping that there isn't really a practical way for most merchants. I mean, for the likes of Amazon you might be able to say, prepay them $500 or so and your orders draw down that money, but random merchants?
Fraud has gone up as well - Card Not Present, which is online transactions are the riskiest of all because a merchant can't really tell if a card is legitimate or fraudulently used because you're really just entering a bunch of numbers. The only "proof" of having the card is the 3 digit CVV. But that's not much protection.
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You could always request that they pay with cryptocurrency.
/ducks
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Re:Not sustainable (Score:5, Insightful)
What do costs have to do with the price? The price is "whatever maximizes my profit". Cost only matters as a number in that equation, and it's by far not the most important one.
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Exactly what costs of theirs have increased that would not be covered already since their model is a % of sales.
Newsflash: yachts and private jets prices have increased.
Also, they have to show their shareholders some increase in profits. Oh, and don't forget the bonuses.
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Agreed. I speculate our tax laws are partially to blame. When capital gains are taxed at such a lower rate, people prefer the stock price to grow instead of dividends. A company earning a stable percentage profit is not going to grow in the stock market. However, in principle, one should be able to make a good living off this kind of stability.
I had zero wives yesterday (Score:2)
Still, I think it's a bad idea. Prices are up and they take a percentage, so they can't hide behind inflation like everyone else. This is just price gouging. The retail companies can pay it though, since they're also price gouging.
The question is will they be able to get consumers to pay more? They've been pushing us pretty damn hard lately. If they keep it up they're gonna s
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The question is will they be able to get consumers to pay more?
Most consumers don't care as long as they get their points or present an image that they are wealthier than they really are.
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And why do they need to raise their prices anyway?
Fraud is dramatically raising their costs.
One of the things that makes credit cards appealing to consumers is the consumer is not responsible for fraudulent transactions. If a $2000 transaction appears on your card and it wasn't you, the charge is reversed. If you order a widget and it never arrives, you can do a chargeback.
Supporting that is becoming more and more expensive for the credit card companies, as more and more transactions move online.
How is it not anti-trust for them both to do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange that they both want to raise rates (="make more money doing nothing different at all") at the same time.
Given the level of market control they have (yeah, start your own card network, go for it) this feels predatory.
Should the processing networks be for-profit organizations? I don't mind them being private, but should they be for-profit?
Re:How is it not anti-trust for them both to do th (Score:5, Interesting)
Both VISA and Mastercard started out as non-profit organizations, actually! They existed simply to help their member banks earn profits.
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And then they went all Office Space (or Superman 3 if you prefer, but I don't...) on the situation, but legally...
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Superman 3 if you prefer
Oh man, it's been a while. Saw this when I was a kid in the theatre, that computer at the end was all kinds of awesome but damn if it didn't make scared shitless that my C=64 was gonna grow tentacles and turn me into a freaky cyborg!
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Strange that they both want to raise rates (="make more money doing nothing different at all") at the same time.
Given the level of market control they have (yeah, start your own card network, go for it) this feels predatory.
Should the processing networks be for-profit organizations? I don't mind them being private, but should they be for-profit?
My guess is that they'll point at Discover and American Express as the alternatives that means that they aren't duopoly and exempt from the anti-trust regulations. Then, 3 months from now, Discover will announce they're increasing the fee and a month after that, Amex.
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Re: How is it not anti-trust for them both to do t (Score:2)
Honestly, after Costco dropped them I have no idea how they remain in business. I see fewer and fewer places accepting them.
Re: How is it not anti-trust for them both to do t (Score:5, Informative)
When I've had fraud on cards, Discover has been just OK, Mastercard and Visa have been awful (Visa once tried to hit my credit for reported fraudulent charges that I reported, because I hadn't paid the bill), and Amex has been superb.
Zero anti-trust law enforcement (Score:2)
It's basically a game of chicken at this point, to see which of the 3 (corporate price gouging, consumer's political demands and the Fed Reserve's desire for a recession) blinks first. Last time the fed blinked when a few banks collapsed due to rising interest rates.
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They don't allow a surcharge, but you are always free to offer a cash discount.
Blame inflation.. (Score:5, Insightful)
..wait a second, if they are doing this because of "inflation" .. shouldn't inflation enable their revenue to increase? Why would they need to increase their cut? They're making more money off inflation already.
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Thing is with an industry like payment processing does increasing the number of providers via competition really enable anything else besides just a method to contain prices? Payment processing has been effectively solved for a couple decades, the biggest innovation in recent times was actually spurred on by Apple. At this point it's more a ubiquitous public utility than an industry that is fighting for consumer demand. Everyone needs to have it, it's not really viable for merchants to do away with it en
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It is for sure contentious but reality is credit cards went from "luxury convenience" to "basic necessity" over the past 20 years so we should treat their processing as a utility. These companies get to triple or quadruple dip on money making.
Even the fact that they are allowed to charge a % fee when the cost to process is independent of the item cost is wildly suspect already.
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To be fair, losses due to unpaid bills and fraud are costs tied to a % of item costs. Still, that's no reason to raise % fees when $ fees are already rising do to inflation, let alone the fact that the fee %s are already pretty high.
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Well, (certain) companies are the ones trying to feed us BS to "justify" their action .. we have the right to at least call them out on it.
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I must push back on that well-known "fact". The law does not say that corporations have to pursue dollars and cents. It basically says that the corporation has to pursue the goals it puts forth in its' charter, prospectus, and other public pronouncements. Corporations do have fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders, but that's not the same as pursuing short term (or even
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Inflation caused people to max out their CCs and now they're fucking broke, get their cards declined everywhere and the revenue for CC companies plummet because their users (and yes, using the same term drug dealers use is quite apt here) can't cause more revenue.
And to make matters worse, most of them will sooner or later default on the money they owe to the CC companies, and even their insane interest rates won't remotely compensate for that. Because guess what, people who were struggling to buy off their
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As long as they could still pay that off, yes.
They're defaulting now. And that means the CC companies have to realize that loss.
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That's not what drives inflation. Inflation is initiated by one or more groups of the economy deciding that what they provide to the economy is worth more than it was before. That in turn drives other groups to do the same and so on and so on until you get to the end of the economic food chain which is the consumer/end-user who demands higher wages, quits to find a higher paying job, and/or goes on strike to demand higher wages. The cycle continues endlessly. Price controls don't fix it because the prod
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Re: Blame inflation.. (Score:2)
"Since there is now more money than before, the relative value of all goods and services increases."
That is not a real thing. More money is added when the economy grows. Costs have gone up only about 15% but prices have risen over 50% because corporations used the pandemic as an excuse to raise prices to increase profits. And we know that happened because they are reporting those increased profits to the IRS.
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Cartel (Score:5, Insightful)
If the two largest competitors in a market raise prices in unison, how is this NOT acting in the fashion of a cartel?
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Exactly!
And that's not even mentioning the power they have to cut companies or organizations they don't like from their customers by refusing to process payments for them, like porn sites, biohacking companies, vaping supplies company or Wikileaks.
EMVCo are private companies that basically hold the modern world's economy by the balls, and they have for decades. How they haven't been Sherman'ed into itty bitty, less powerful and less dangerous pieces, or heavily regulated yet, I'll never know. I can only gue
Re:Cartel (Score:5, Insightful)
how is this NOT acting in the fashion of a cartel?
They have always been a cartel. It's interesting to see that they no longer see a need to pretend.
I am sure DOJ will get on it right away.
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The government getting rid of cash would allow them to do what exactly?
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Stores already track what you buy and the cameras are good enough to read the serial numbers on the currency. The government doesn't give a single fuck what you buy at Target.
I hate to be that guy... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I hate to be that guy... (Score:4, Interesting)
The business that I have been involved with inflation has pushed up costs at the published rate, but government regulation has ran at twice that cost increase for the past decade. We passed little of the government costs on, we had a large buffer because productivity improvements, because we thought government might back off the economic death wish.
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The regulatory part of the credit card industry cannot be ignored. They are very tightly controlled by the EU and USA governments and spend much money responding to pressures put on them by government regulators. I suspect most of the their costs going to this regulation have nothing to do with security, reliability, resiliency and quality of service. Government overreach has expanded particularly to CC networks.
Both Visa and MasterCard are publicly traded. Their financials are a matter of public record. There is no reason to guess.
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You're probably not wrong... but really? These major credit card companies started out as non-profits who just served the purpose of helping banks make money. It seems to me someone could start up a new credit card that adhered to that original concept and charged only very minimal transaction fees.
The current system the card providers have is really kind of a false savings for most customers/users. They convince you to use their card often because of "cash back" offers or points you earn towards various t
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As a shopper, I specifically want to use my credit card because of the protections it provides to me, against online scammers or uncooperative shopkeepers, when there is a dispute. Because I use a credit card, I have a channel to press my case, and I can get my money back even if the seller refuses to provide a refund. With decentralized payment methods like crypto, there is no recourse, your money is gone.
Why, though? (Score:5, Informative)
It is not like their profits are down.
Just checked. VISA's net profit margin is 51.16%, which is unheard of in many industries, and they quarterly net income has reached 4.16B. That is much more than Intel, AMD, or other companies that actually have research and development costs.
Their operations stay the same all the while they should growing in number of customers, and number of transactions per customer. In other words, volume is up.
Basically there is no other reason than: "yes we can" in this rate hike.
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That level of profit is MONOPOLY LEVEL and screams anti-trust!
So we have basically 2 companies who survive by not merging but work way too well together to be real competition.
The squeeze of the cartel... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what happens when physical cash payments become the rare exception rather than the norm.
Once physical cash has gone the monopoly simply gets bigger and more powerful.
Then we start entering a more dystopian world.
Everything is just rosey until the bank decide, whether due to clerical error or something more dystopian, to halt or close your bank account.
Then you are well and truly screwed.
Add to this the rising prevalence of paying for goods with a smart phone and suddenly you are in a world that has a very big single point of failure.
If the "cartels" systems suffer a massive outage, all commerce ceases.
You can't even buy a pint of milk.
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And it becomes easy to create a "social credit" system like China. Want to really punish someone without locking them up? You could cut off their ability to make purchases or even adjust them to the level of pain you want to inflict, this is in addition to the monitoring of your purchasing they can do.
I'm afraid of the same thing happening if more and more brick-and-mortar stores disappear and the delivery services have a chokehold on purchasing.
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Or even prohibit certain purchases under certain circumstances. Pregnant? No plane tickets to states where certain health care procedures at legal for you, and your card won't work in such states either. Pandemic quarantine? Card won't work in brick-n-mortars more than x distance from the home. Parolee/probationer? Card won't work in liquor stores, and it will "phone home" if you even try.
Fortunately, this is largely a US/China phenomenon ... brick-and-mortar and cash economies are actually thriving i
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Why are merchants not offering cash discounts? It seems to me that they too prefer customers to use credit. It is definitely simpler for them.
Use Discover (Score:3)
F visa and mc. Use Discover card. US-based customer service. Accepted most everywhere that the others are, except my g.d. car insurance company.
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Paywalled (Score:2)
I wish people wouldn't post links to the WSJ. Paywalled.
Antitrust (Score:4, Insightful)
These two cards have an effective monopoly. Notably, they fail to compete with each other: as in this case, *both* are raising fees. I believe "collusion" is the term.
As usual, our governments are failing to regulate the market effectively.
A Drag on the Economy (Score:2)
Duopoly problem.
$98 billion just in fees... talk about dragging down the economy.
So the credit card model of making money on the interest against my loan is not enough? They also need to take a cut of the transaction from the merchant for the privilege to allow customers to easily take out more loan money to for the CC company to make more money from increased or revolving loan amount?
How hard would it be to create a mandatory open processing standard for point of sales terminals to accept any secure card
Credit cards? (Score:2)
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It's really you just getting your own money back again.
Everything is 2-3% higher in price so you are paying .5% more while feeling good you get 1.5% back unless you have a late bill or something and lose your gains.... or you pay in cash and then that 2% at least goes to the merchant. If you buy something that is tiny the merchant loses their profit completely because a minimum transaction fee could be 10-25 cents.
Furthermore, your cash back is delayed so they make money investing that 0 interest LOAN you
Well boys... (Score:2)
Boss: We posted record profits for the last 40 quarters. What's next?
C-suite Gremlins: We could raise our fees.
Boss: BRILLIANT!
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Which will lead to... (Score:2)
1) Merchants passing along the fee to customers via price increases
2) Some merchants will start to offer lower prices for customers that pay cash. I already see this at some gas stations.
3) The acceleration of alternate payment methods that bypass credit cards completely.
Remember Amazon almost banning Visa? (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember Amazon almost banning Visa transactions in the UK?
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Presumably, behind the scenes, Visa agreed to cut the fees charged for any Amazon transaction. So now we have a two tier system - companies with Amazon's muscle can negotiate their own percentage, and every other company pays extra. Unlike most companies affected by this story, I bet Amazon's fees aren't getting raised.
UPI network in India (Score:2)
Greed vs competition (Score:2)
I have deep respect for businesses who refuse to accept credit cards or who at least charge the customer more to cover the cost of the tax instead of hiding it. I look forward to watching this antiquated system collapse under the weight of its own selfish greed.
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