Senators Introduce Bipartisan Credit Card Competition Legislation
Last week, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Roger Marshall (R-KS)
introduced
the bipartisan
Credit Card Competition Act of 2022,
legislation that would enhance competition and choice in the credit card network market. Under the legislation, the Federal Reserve would issue regulations, within one year, ensuring that banks in four-party card systems that have assets of over $100 billion cannot restrict the number of networks on which an electronic credit transaction may be processed to less than two unaffiliated networks, at least one of which must be outside of the top two largest networks. This would inject real competition into the credit card market, opening the door for new market entrants such as current debit-only networks, encouraging innovation and enhanced security, creating backup options if a network crashes and exerting competitive constraints on Visa and Mastercard’s fee rates. Read more
here.