Merchants Redouble Their Efforts to Push the Fed on Debit s Routing And Pricing Rules – Digital Transactions digitaltransactions.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from digitaltransactions.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
Nearly a decade after promulgation of Regulation II better known as the Durbin Amendment the Federal Reserve Board proposed changes to modernize the regulation by clarifying that the exclusivity prohibition applies to card-not-present transactions, such as online purchases.
On March 7, the Federal Reserve Board issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPR) requiring debit card issuers to provide at least two unaffiliated networks to process card-not-present debit card transactions. As drafted, the NPR would amend Regulation II (Debit Card Interchange Fees and Routing), promulgated under Section 1075 of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which amended the Electronic Funds Transfer Act to add a new Section 920 regarding interchange transaction fees for electronic debit transactions and rules for payment card transactions.
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
The Fed’s final rule implementing the Durbin Amendment (Regulation II) went into effect in October 2011. Nearly ten years later, the final rule is still provoking controversy in the form of a new lawsuit and proposed amendments to the rule and its official commentary.
The Durbin Amendment (Section 1075 of Dodd-Frank) authorized the Fed to issue regulations to ensure that the amount of any interchange fee received by a large debit card issuer (one with at least $10 billion of assets, together with its affiliates) is reasonable and proportional to the cost incurred by the issuer. It also limited the restrictions that issuers and payment card networks can place on the processing of an electronic debit card transaction.
May 10, 2021
Pressure may be building on the Federal Reserve to take action on a debit card interchange-fee regulation that it has left intact for 10 years despite sweeping changes in the payments business, including an onrush of e-commerce transactions over the past year.
In part, observers are reacting to a report the Fed released Friday indicating that issuers’ authorization, clearing, and settlement (ACS) costs for debit have declined dramatically over the years. In 2019, those costs came to 3.9 cents per transaction, roughly half the costs in 2009, according to the report. At the same time, the 10-year-old Fed ceiling on debit card interchange, which flows to issuers, in 2019 was greater than total ACS costs plus fraud losses for nearly 79% of covered issuers and close to 100% of covered transactions, the report says.