978 US merchants want to overturn the interchange settlement with Visa and Mastercard
In an objection letter to the competent US federal court, 978 signatories are calling for the proposed settlement in the credit card fee case to be rejected. The core criticism: interchange falls by only one tenth of a percentage point. For European merchants the case is instructive, because here this very item has been capped since 2015 — and costs are rising anyway.
What happened
In the week before 14 September 2026, an objection letter against the proposed settlement in the decades-old credit card fee case was filed with the competent US federal court; Supermarket News reported on the 14th, Finextra on 15 September. 978 signatories — trade associations as well as retailers, restaurants, supermarkets, convenience chains and petrol stations of every size — are calling on Judge Brian Cogan to reject the settlement. The case goes back to a class action from 2005 accusing Visa and Mastercard of centrally setting the fees charged by card-issuing banks. The current proposal, granted preliminary approval in June, provides among other things for lower fees and more freedom of choice in card acceptance. The signatories counter that they were not involved in the negotiation, that interchange falls by only one tenth of a percentage point and thus back to the 2023 level, and that the duration of the associated waiver of claims is unclear. Doug Kantor of the Merchant Payments Coalition calls the proposal the industry's third attempt to secure its model through the courts.
Who it affects
Directly, US merchants. Indirectly, every European merchant whose statement shows the items interchange, scheme fee and provider margin — and everyone who believes that a cap on one of those three items settles the cost question.
Assessment
Europe decided the dispute the Americans are currently fighting eleven years ago, by law. The Interchange Fee Regulation caps the interbank fee on consumer cards from the EEA at 0.2 per cent for debit and 0.3 per cent for credit cards. Anyone placing a US statement next to a German one immediately sees what that is worth. And yet no merchant here stops complaining that card payments are getting more expensive — because the capped item is not the one that is growing. What has grown is everything beside it: scheme fees, authorisation charges, line items with names that appear in no proposal. The European Commission has been examining exactly that since 2024; to this day there is no decision.
The lesson for German merchants is therefore uncomfortable and practical at the same time: a cap only protects the item it sits on. As long as an offer quotes a blended rate rather than three numbers, nobody knows which part is regulated and which can rise freely. Legally, separate disclosure is even the standard case under the Interchange Fee Regulation; in practice almost nobody supplies it unasked. This is not an American problem, it is a question you can put to your payment network operator (Netzbetreiber) — today, without a court.
What to do now
- Open your last monthly statement and check whether interchange, scheme fee and provider margin are shown separately. If only one percentage rate appears there, request the breakdown in writing.
- Compare how the non-interchange items have developed over twelve months. Cost increases almost always come from there, not from the capped part.
- Before the next negotiation, determine your own card mix — share of girocard, EEA debit, commercial and third-country cards. Without that distribution no offer can be compared with another.