As explained by financial experts in their interview to “Market Leader”, market has shown almost no reaction to the huge fines. Reason: the market has worked on this piece of news when it was at the stage of the court considering the sum of fine to be paid by these companies.
Sellers have filed a suit concerning excessive commission while paying for a purchase by a plastic card. MasterCard, Visa, and a number of largest American banks, providing bank card services to their customers, have agreed to pay 7 bln. dollars in order to resolve the conflict with retailers, as informed by Reuters. Abovementioned companies have been accused of unlawful agreement with the purpose to set excessive commission to be paid by retail sellers when paying by plastic cards. Initiated process is promising to become the largest case of anti-monopoly regulation in the history of the United States. If such agreement is approved by the judge, it will help to regulate tens of lawsuits from retailers that have been filed in 2005.
Producers of credit cards and various banks allow retail sellers to additionally charge customers for using cards of a certain type in order to make them chose cheapest means of payment. Yesterday regulation papers were given to Brooklyn Federal Court. Such discontent has been caused by the fact that sellers had to pay extremely high fees for servicing customers that paid for their purchases by plastic cards.
Terms of agreement between the parties foresee that retailers may initiate negotiations with financial organizations concerning the size of such fees. Sellers, in their turn, are supposed to inform their customers about the size of commission when paying by such plastic cards. Claimants’ advocate Bonny Suinny is certain that this is only a historic agreement.
Craig Wildfeng, another advocate, supposes that current agreement will make it possible to remove the competitive advantage of existing banks, which used to control the use of all plastic cards, and turn the situation to the benefit of sellers and customers.
According to the experts of Commodity Trading Department, the companies have no debts, their profit keeps rising since last year, the money flow from the company’s main activity keeps rising, they are systematically underestimated, as it is characterized by positive surprise when actual profit appears higher than expected in the course of last four quarters. Therefore, due to good state of affairs the company has not suffered much from fines.
