Madison Reporter

Katy Lamberty, a resident of Mount Horeb, said perennially-proposed federal credit card regulations could result in fewer options for credit card holders and threaten credit card rewards programs.

"The Credit Card Competition Act has nothing to do with competition and everything to do with big box stores trying to use Congress to take money from us and give it to them," wrote Lamberty in a letter to the editor in The Verona Press. "Under the Credit Card Competition Act, banks and credit unions would be forced to offer credit card processing networks they do not want."

"These networks would shift a portion of each sale at big box stores away from our credit card rewards programs and instead put it in the pocket of these stores," Lamberty wrote. 

Originally sponsored by U.S. Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kans.), the so-called Credit Card Competition Act would require banks to offer merchants at least two network options, one of which cannot be Visa or Mastercard, for processing credit card transactions. Opponents to the bill argue that if given the choice, retailers would likely choose cheaper, less secure networks for processing transactions, thereby exposing consumers to increased securities and fraud risks.  

The bill applies to credit cards what a similar measure in 2010, often referred to as the “Durbin Amendment,” applied to debit cards. The 2010 measure was a requirement of the “Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.”

Nationally, the bill could lead to a $227 billion loss in U.S. economic activity and 156,000 lost jobs, according to an analysis conducted for the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC) by Oxford Economics Research (OER).

In 2024, both the Wisconsin Bankers Association and Wisconsin Credit Union League signed on to a letter to Congressional leadership opposing the bill.