The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, announced the Justice Department’s antitrust division was looking in to whether Visa limited merchants’ ability to route debit-card transactions over card networks that are often less expensive. Merchants have complained about the high cost of network fees, or interchange fees, which can be 2% or more of each transaction and go to the financial institutions behind the transactions.
Industry group the Merchants Payments Coalition called the probe good news. The Justice Department declined comment on 19 March 2021.
At the beginning of 2020, Visa and fintech startup Plaid called off a USD 5.3 billion merger after the government sued to stop the deal and called Visa a ‘monopolist in online debit transactions’.
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