State Letter Opposing Credit Card Competition Act

If enacted, this bill would force an overhaul of the payments landscape at significant systemic cost – a cost ultimately borne by consumers and the community banks that serve them. Community banks would be forced to subsidize system-wide costs and their customer data would be at risk.

Many would retreat from card issuance in response. The legislation is poorly conceived and would exclusively benefit the largest “big-box” merchants including Amazon, Walmart, and others. This bill would create new credit card routing mandates by the Board of the Federal Reserve requiring banks with over $100 billion in assets to offer merchants at least two networks to process credit cards, at least one of which cannot be owned by Visa or Mastercard.