TOTM

Competitive Payments

Most of the discussion related to pricing at the point of sale has emphasized the “cross-subsidy” between those that pay with cash and checks and those that pay with credit cards.  This discussion misses the core of the problem in a market where the use of cash and checks is rapidly declining; the central problem is the differential pricing of different card products.  The reaction of the card networks to their “loss” in the debit-card and American Express litigation was to create two new product lines (Visa Signature and World MasterCard) that have unusually high interchange fees, 1-2% higher than typical Visa and MasterCard products.  The rationale for these products from the network’s perspective is two-fold.  First, the increased interchange revenues compensate for lowered interchange revenues on debit-card transactions.  Second, issuers collect higher interchange revenues and thus would not shift their business out of Visa and MasterCard and toward American Express.

Read the full piece here.