Durbin Amendment critics have long accused merchants of pocketing the billions they’ve saved since the amendment’s highly controversial debit card interchange price controls took effect two years ago Tuesday. Now, however, retailers are rolling out a study estimating that merchants passed on $5.86 billion in Durbin-related savings to consumers last …

  Eight years from their genesis, the lawsuits challenging bank card interchange now collectively known as MDL 1720 are scheduled to reach a milestone Thursday when U.S. District Judge John Gleeson convenes a so-called fairness hearing in his Brooklyn, N.Y., courtroom. The hearing’s purpose is for Gleeson to determine whether …

By Jim Daly and John Stewart A judge says the Federal Reserve Board failed to carry out Congress’s will for debit cards when it wrote its rules implementing the Durbin Amendment. Now what? Most businesses dislike government regulations. But they really hate situations where a regulation gets upended, the result …

In one of the most dramatic developments of the year in the electronic-payments business, a federal judge on Wednesday struck down the Federal Reserve Board’s pricing and routing rules for debit card transactions, arguing the banking regulator misinterpreted federal law. The rules, which implemented the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 …

Elizabeth Whalen Merchants focus most of their attention on interchange when they think of card-acceptance costs, but now network fees and related charges are in the spotlight. Are such charges an expression of oligopolistic power? When MasterCard Inc.’s new digital-wallet fee takes effect this month, it will join a growing …

Lauri Giesen The early battles in the debit-network war triggered by the Durbin Amendment took a big toll on Visa’s Interlink brand, but now Visa has converted an obscure program into a powerful weapon. How are the EFT networks responding? Before April 2012, making a decision about which network over …

As they began their work, some Federal Reserve Board governors expressed uneasiness with the task Congress assigned them in 2010 through the Dodd-Frank Act: implement the debit card regulations called for in the sweeping law’s Durbin Amendment. In March, however, the Fed expressed enough satisfaction with its handiwork to declare …

Karen Epper Hoffman It’s been 18 months since the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect. Who is benefitting the most from the first government intervention into card-acceptance pricing? A year-and-a-half after the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect, the radical legislation that created the cap remains …

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released another report on debit card revenues and expenses and says it does not plan to propose changes to its controversial debit regulations implementing the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. Dodd-Frank requires the Fed to report on the debit card market every two …

Now that the debit card interchange controls mandated by the Durbin Amendment have been in place for nearly a year-and-a-half, observers have decided to check in on the small financial institutions exempted by Durbin to see whether their fears about the law have been proven by experience. You may recall …