Merchants who accepted Visa or Mastercard at any time between January 1, 2004, to January 25, 2019, may be eligible for a share of a $5.6 billion class action settlement known as the Payment Card Interchange Fee Settlement. The deadline to file a claim is May 31.
The settlement resolves an antitrust case brought by retailers against Visa and Mastercard for allegedly conspiring to fix high “swipe fees,” which were said to cover processing, while imposing rules that prevented merchants from steering customers to other payment methods. The fees were typically 1% to 2% of the purchase price. This settlement covers about 18 million businesses.
Tampa Bay Business and Wealth spoke to John Waterman, managing partner of Best CFOs, to learn more about which businesses could qualify and what they should do before the deadline.
What does this mean, in a nutshell, for those who may not understand?
If your business accepted Visa/MasterCard from 2004 to 2019 you are eligible to file a claim in their recent class action settlement.
If a business accepted Visa and MasterCard, then they were affected because part of the fees they were charged they should not have been charged. There’s an application process you must file to get your money back. I would say a merchant would have had to accept about $1 million in Visa and MasterCard payments to make it worth their time to file, because you’re not going to receive $1 for every dollar back. You won’t get it all back, but you can get some of it back.
Business owners are busy running businesses, not really looking at their credit card statements. The majority of business owners I’ve spoken to are unaware of this entire thing, which is why I’ve tried to share the information.
How can businesses find out if this is something they should take advantage of?
Any business that accepted Visa/MasterCard from 2004-2019 is eligible, and encouraged, to file a claim. This link takes only a few minutes to fill out and, once completed, a DocuSign will be sent to authorize us to file a claim on your behalf.
