Lizeth GeorgeThe Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA) was recently introduced by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Roger Marshall (R-KS), JD Vance (R-OH), and Peter Welch (D-VT) and Reps. Lance Gooden (R-TX), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Thomas Tiffany (R-WI), and Jefferson Van Drew (R-NJ) and seeks to further regulate the credit card market. This legislation would require covered card issuers (issuers over $100 billion in assets) to include at least two unaffiliated networks on which an electronic credit card transaction may be processed and states the networks cannot be the two networks holding the largest market shares of credit cards in the US (Visa or Mastercard). This legislation is a repeat of a failed experiment. In 2010, Durbin succeeded in bringing routing mandates to the debit card market. The policy has been bad for consumers and is directly responsible for redistributing more than $23 billion directly from consumers to retailers like Target and Walmart over the last decade.
We need credit unions to write Congress and urge policymakers to stop further advancement of the CCCA, as it would severely impact financial institutions of all sizes. The new bill is predicted to decrease interchange income by over 50% (even for financial institutions under the $100 billion threshold). While the revised bill attempts to identify payment networks deemed a risk to national security, we remain adamantly opposed to the bill as it would weaken a system that already works in the best interest of the consumer.
