Pricing

MyKaarma, a payments service for automobile dealers, said its surcharge service, myKaarma Surcharge, has achieved compliance with Honest Pricing Laws that have been enacted in several states, including California and New York. Surcharging allows merchants to add their cost of credit card acceptance to a bill when a customer presents a credit …

The U.S. Department of Transportation is looking into airline rewards programs with an eye on protecting consumers from potential unfair, deceptive, or anticompetitive practices, the department says. Many consumers use cobranded airline credit cards to earn points in these programs, though the DOT’s focus is on rewards, not on card-issuing …

High card-acceptance fees are the root cause for why some merchants are charging consumers for cash back at the point-of-sale, a service merchants have historically provided consumers even though customers can make purchases with their debit cards at no charge, says the Merchants Payment Coalition. Driving the trend is that …

Retailers providing cash-back services at the point of sale fill a void for many consumers who may live in so-called banking deserts, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says in a new report on the service. Some, however, charge a fee for that access, along with other banking hurdles. The Cash-back …

Merchants want lower interchange. In their Shangri-la, interchange would be negative, meaning merchants would be paid to accept credit and debit cards. This is not unknown in the real world. For example, Australia’s national debit network for many years had negative interchange. Merchants want to be able to freely surcharge …

Several organizations representing banks and credit unions filed a lawsuit late Thursday challenging Illinois’s Interchange Fee Prohibition Act, which was signed into law June 7. The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, was brought by the Illinois Bankers Association, The American Bankers Association, …

While merchants, like consumers, love credit and debit cards, they don’t like having to pay to accept them. It’s human nature to want to pay less for products and services, no matter how good they are. To reduce payment-acceptance fees, merchants have brought a battery of antitrust lawsuits against Mastercard …

Merchants were granted a second extension late Tuesday for filing claims against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. in their ongoing class-action lawsuit against the two networks over interchange costs. U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of New York Margo K. Brodie, who is presiding over the case, moved …

Merchants’ disdain for interchange is well documented, but one aspect of card-acceptance costs that gets drowned out by the outcry over interchange is that rising processing fees are hitting merchants harder than interchange hikes, according to some observers. Processors’ rate hikes have been running between 0.25% and 1.5% in recent …

Mastercard Inc.’s chief executive early Wednesday deplored the recent collapse of a key interchange settlement and highlighted the card company’s rapid progress in tokenization, a key technology that masks actual card data from potential cyberthieves. Pointing to a U.S. District Court judge’s rejection last month of an agreement between merchants and …