Visa and Mastercard are going to increase fees for paying with credit cards – Kommersant

In the near future, the two largest payment systems in the world, Visa and MasterCard, are going to increase the commissions that retailers pay for paying for purchases with credit cards. Writes about it The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) with reference to sources. According to them, companies will start raising commissions in October this year and April next year. Various commissions will be increased, but most of them will affect purchases in online stores. According to the WSJ, citing the calculations of the consulting company CMSPI, in total, due to the increase in commissions, retailers will pay more than $ 502 million a year.

Part of the commissions goes directly to payment systems, part – to banks servicing cards. They attribute the increase in fees to the rising cost of fighting fraud and the need to innovate. The total credit card fees paid by U.S. retailers Visa and MasterCard have risen from $33 billion in 2012 to $93 billion in 2022, according to the Nilson Report.

Card fees are a common cause of conflict between retailers and payment systems. Retailers regularly serve lawsuits and complaints about overpriced, in their opinion, commissions. In addition, some shops, cafes, etc., especially small ones, offer discounts for paying with debit cards, cash or checks. According to Doug Cantor, head of an association that brings together small stores in the United States, such stores are now already suffering from inflation and a rise in the key rate, some of which have not yet fully recovered from the pandemic. “Now it’s just a bad combination (of different factors -” Kommersant “) and a bad time for such an increase in commissions,” he said.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya