Pricing

More than 120 retailers sent a letter Tuesday to the U.S. House of Representative’s Financial Services Committee urging the panel to reconsider two measures that would repeal the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. The bills stand virtually no chance of becoming law while Barack Obama remains president, but with …

• More than 120 retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, Best Buy, and 7-Eleven, signed a letter urging the U.S. House of Representative’s Financial Services Committee to reconsider the elimination of the Durbin Amendment that would happen if two pending bills become law. • After a three-week trial, a Superior Court judge …

Merchants that add surcharges to credit card transactions likely can continue to do so despite the overturning of the interchange settlement that enabled them to do so. A federal appeals court last week threw out an agreement initially reached four years ago over card-network interchange and acceptance rules. The interchange …

U.S. Bank tried, but it couldn’t make its $6.95 fee for real-time person-to-person payments stick. The nation’s fifth-largest bank by assets disclosed Wednesday that such payments are now free. The Minneapolis-based bank says it was the first to go live with real-time payments over the bank-developed clearXchange P2P payments network, …

How do consumers feel about payment card acceptance costs, often referred to as “swipe fees”? According to a recent National Retail Federation survey, consumers want the existing debit card interchange price cap to continue, and they want credit card pricing to benefit them and merchants as opposed to “credit card …

Speaking of merchant-network skirmishes, fighting between Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Visa Inc. broke out anew last month when, citing high acceptance costs, Wal-Mart’s Canadian unit announced that it will no longer accept Visa payment cards in its stores through a gradual phase-out set to begin July 18. Wal-Mart’s carefully phrased …

Depending on your point of view, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., became either a hero or a villain in the payments business back in 2010 with his Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act. Among other things, the amendment capped debit card interchange for large issuers, pleasing merchants and ruffling the feathers …

The sweeping 4-year-old settlement between card networks and banks on the one hand and merchants on the other, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned Thursday, covered a lot of ground. But the case the agreement grew out of had as its central focus credit card …

• In a huge legal development for the payment card industry, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today overturned a lower court’s 2013 approval of a $7.25 billion settlement of a merchant class-action lawsuit accusing Visa, MasterCard, and some banks of antitrust violations in setting credit card interchange. The appellate …

Visa Inc. on Wednesday filed a counterclaim against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. alleging that the retailer’s May lawsuit against the network is not an issue involving violations of federal regulations regarding debit cards, as Wal-Mart cast it, but a contract dispute. Visa says Wal-Mart “fraudulently induced” it to sign an acceptance …