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30/04/2010 -
Merchants upset with the rising interchange fees associated with card payment processing might have seen a potential breakthrough on Wednesday, DigitalTransactions.com reports.After staying mum on the subject, the U.S. House of Representatives met for a hearing discussing the Credit Card Fee Act of 2009 and listened to both proponents and opponents of the bill, which hopes to regulate card-accessed fees by banks and card associations.
Craig Shearman, vice president of public relations for the National Retail Federation, believes this meeting is significant.
"The congressional schedule is so busy during an election year when they're going to be ending the year early that a chairman doesn't generally hold [a meeting] unless he or she has an intention of doing something," Shearman said, Digital Transactions reports. The NRF is part of a merchant coalition pushing for legislation that would allow merchants to negotiate interchange fees.
The House's meeting came on the same day Visa announced an increase in debit card interchange fees for American retailers to 0.95 percent, the Huffington Post reported. One speaker at the hearing reported that interchange fees cost him twice as much as the labor costs of running his shop, according to Digital Transactions.
In 2008, Visa announced its interchange fees for Canadian retailers to be 0.6 percent for debit card transactions, according to another Digital Transactions report.
