USA. The Airport Restaurant and Retail Association (ARRA) has joined the Merchants Payments Coalition (MPC), a nonprofit group of retailers advocating for fair and competitive credit and debit card swipe fees for merchants.
ARRA Executive Director Andrew Weddig said: “Airport merchants continue to recover from the pandemic and still face many challenges including high credit card swipe fees that drive up the cost of doing business and prices for our customers.
“Our members desperately need relief from unjustifiably high swipe fees and we know the banking industry’s scare tactics about rewards going away are false. Bringing competition to swipe fees will only help businesses that rely on travel and tourism.”
ARRA members provide food, beverages, retail products and services at airports across the country and employ more than 110,000 workers.
MPC Executive Committee member and National Association of Convenience Stores General Counsel Doug Kantor said: “We welcome ARRA members to the fight for fair, competitive swipe fees. These businesses see the impact of these out-of-control fees every day and their involvement shows that swipe fees touch virtually every merchant whether they do business downtown, at the mall, online or even at the airport.”
ARRA’s membership with the MPC comes as the US Congress is considering the Credit Card Competition Act, a legislation addressing the increasing credit card swipe fees.
Visa and Mastercard, which control than 80% of the market, each centrally set swipe fees charged by all banks that issue cards under their brands. They also lock out transactions from being processed by other competitors offering lower fees and better security.
The legislation would require banks with more than US$100 billion in assets to enable cards they issue to be processed over at least two unaffiliated networks – Visa or Mastercard plus a competitor such as NYCE, Star or Shazam. That would make payment networks compete over fees, security and service and is expected to save merchants and their customers US$16.4 billion a year.
Data cited by MPC suggests that credit and debit card swipe fees have more than doubled over the last ten years, reaching a record US$172.05 billion last year.
The fees are most merchants’ highest operating cost after labour and drive up prices by more than US$1,100 a year for the average family, the coalition noted.
Current MPC national association members include associations from across different sectors as well as hundreds of state merchant associations in the USA. ✈
