Bucks Blog: A Different Skirmish Over A.T.M. Card Fees

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The latest skirmish over card fees is about the fees charged at independently operated A.T.M.’s — those cash machines not affiliated with banks that you see in convenience stores, hotel lobbies and airports.

The National ATM Council Inc., an industry group, and about a dozen individual firms filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against Visa and MasterCard, accusing the payment networks of fixing prices by forcing the independent operators to charge consumers set fees.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, seeks class-action status and sheds light on the often-arcane payment arrangements underlying the country’s A.T.M. networks. The suit contends that Visa and MasterCard prevent nonbank A.T.M. operators from charging users discounted access fees, even when consumers use cards that can use alternative, cheaper payment networks.

Visa and MasterCard both declined to comment on the suit.

While MasterCard and Visa are the biggest networks, there are also less well-known networks, like Star and Shazam, that process debit transactions.

A.T.M. operators, the suit says, may charge cardholders an access fee — but only if the same fee is charged, whether the machine performs a Visa or MasterCard transaction or uses another debit network. So even though the Visa and MasterCard networks can be more costly for operators to use, the rules bar an operator from offering consumers a lower fee for A.T.M. transactions not completed over Visa or MasterCard’s networks, said Jonathan Rubin, the lawyer for the operators.

“By restricting their ability to attract customers to lower-cost A.T.M. services through lower prices, the A.T.M. restraints put a competitive straitjacket on A.T.M. operators,” the suit says.

The practice, the suit says, artificially raises the price that consumers pay for A.T.M. services and limits the revenue that A.T.M. operators can earn. If operators could put a sign on their cash machines, for instance, saying the fee is $2 for Visa or MasterCard, but $1 for cards using other networks, the machines could charge lower fees, Mr. Rubin said. The operators, he added, would make more money because more people would use their machines.

“We’re looking for more machines and more competition,” Mr. Rubin said.

There are about 400,000 A.T.M.’s in the United States, and about half are run by nonbank operators, he said.

Do you think consumers would benefit from more competition among payment networks?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c81ff2a8eaf6cac5d5fc9e7e1e519477