The Lever - Swiping At Swiping Monopolies

Friends:

Good things are happening! The Feds take on Big Credit Card and take aim at big, bad junk fees, regulators strike again at a fossil fuel company’s poisonous machinery, and voter suppression gets suppressed.

Hi! I’m Sam Pollak, and I am so excited to join The Lever as an editorial fellow, where I’ll be bringing you good news every week. I work as a staff reporter for the Provincetown Independent, a wonderful local independent newspaper on Cape Cod. I am continuously blown away by how deep The Lever’s reporting goes to uncover corporate and political malfeasance. For every story that deserves a little digging, The Lever digs deeper.

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A Swipe at Visa’s Swiping Kingdom

The Justice Department took another big swing last week at Visa, the world’s largest payment card company, threatening its dominance over the debit card market. The agency’s lawsuit, filed on Sept. 24, alleges that the credit card giant uses illegal schemes to stymie debit card competition, such as offering lucrative incentives to potential competitors in exchange for backing out of its territory. 

Whenever you use your card to make a purchase, the merchant you buy it from only gets 97 or 98 cents on the dollar. The rest goes to Visa and the bank that issued the card. This is known as a “swipe fee,” and Visa, which controls about 60 percent of the U.S.-based merchant debit payments market, rakes more than $7 billion per year in swipe fees.