Visa Chief, Top Merchant Official Could Meet As Early As September

The new chief executive of Visa U.S.A. could meet with a top official of the National Retail Federation and the Merchants Payments Coalition as early as September to discuss interchange and other issues, according to a spokesman for both merchant organizations. John Philip Coghlan, the former Charles Schwab & Co. Inc. executive who took over at Visa on Monday (Digital Transactions News, July 11), called Mallory Duncan, senior vice president and general counsel at the NRF, very soon after assuming his duties, the spokesman says. He says that in the call, which lasted about five minutes, Coghlan introduced himself and expressed an interest in learning more about retailing and merchants' current payment concerns. He and Duncan, who also serves as chairman for the Washington, D.C.-based Merchants Payments Coalition, agreed to meet but did not set a date or an agenda for the meeting, the spokesman says. With various executives away on vacations at both Visa and the NRF, the spokesman says, the meeting is not likely to take place before Labor Day. Still, he says, “If [Coghlan] called up and said he wanted to come in here and meet next week, we'd certainly meet with him.” The merchant organizations hold out at least some hope that the meeting will lead to resolution of longstanding merchant gripes about the bank card networks, with interchange pricing chief among them. “Certainly with a change at the top [of Visa], there's hope we can revisit some of the issues we've worked on in the past several years and perhaps have a more favorable outcome on some of the issues where we've had differences,” says the spokesman. “But it's very early. Coghlan has just started in the job.” The Merchants Payments Coalition was formed early this year by the NRF and 12 other merchant trade groups specifically to lobby for regulatory relief on bank card interchange, a system in which merchants pay acquirers for bank card acceptance (Digital Transactions News, May 2 and June 17). Acquirers pass interchange on to bank card issuers. Interchange rates, which are set by Visa and MasterCard International, have gone up in recent months, arousing merchant ire and sparking an antitrust lawsuit last month by small merchants against major banks and the bank card associations (Digital Transactions News, June 23). Almost as soon as he took the helm from long-time Visa head Carl F. Pascarella, Coghlan, a former merchant, said he wanted to meet with merchants to gain a better understanding of their position on interchange, though this seemingly conciliatory stance has met with some skepticism (Digital Transactions News, July 12).