Debit Battle Lost, MasterCard Slams ‘Price-Fixing’

The banking industry has lost the battle against debit interchange regulation several times over, but some executives are still fighting the good fight.

Executives at an industry conference on Wednesday evening could not resist taking a few jabs at the regulations slashing their long-cherished debit card interchange fees. Banks are expected to lose more than $5 billion in annual revenues as a result of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which capped the fees that merchants pay banks when customers buy things with their debit cards. 

The caps went into effect on Oct. 1, despite the banking industry’s furious, repeated efforts to have that provision of the law repealed or delayed. And some industry members are still smarting from the defeat.

“We’re only 33 days into the new era. Of government price-fixing,” Leland Englebardt, MasterCard Inc.’s group head of global network products, said during a panel discussion, generating a round of applause from the audience.

He later declined to comment to the panel “on whether the government’s actions in any respect are justified or unjustified. They are what they are.”

Englebardt and executives from Visa Inc., Discover Financial Services, and other transaction networks spoke during a presentation at the ATM Debit & Prepaid Forum, an annual industry conference sponsored by American Banker publisher SourceMedia Inc. 

“Price-fixing” became a familiar refrain from MasterCard and Visa last year, as they urged Congress and the Federal Reserve Board to reconsider the debit interchange regulations.

But that language is a double-edged sword in the long-running interchange battles between banks and retailers. Both sides regularly toss around words that most of us haven’t heard much since our high school comparative government class. 

Merchants are especially fond of calling Visa and MasterCard a “duopoly” or “cartel.” Retailers have long protested the ways that the world’s two largest payments networks determine the prices that banks can charge for accepting debit and credit cards.

And several opponents have accused Visa and MasterCard of “price-fixing” themselves. Just last month, a group of ATM operators filed a lawsuit against the networks alleging just that. 

As Heidi Moore, the Wall Street correspondent for MarketPlace Radio, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night, “MasterCard seems to like price-fixing better when it's their idea!”