The proposals specifically seek to determine whether interchange fees for processing a transaction are “reasonable and proportional to certain issuer costs”.
It forms the most significant update to the cap since the Reserve first implemented restrictions on debit card issuers with assets in excess of $10 billion in 2011.
The move would lower the current interchange fee on a $50 purchase, for example, from 0.49% to 0.35%. The Reserve says that this would better reflect the true cost of issuer processing since the rules first took hold through the The Dodd-Frank Act, which itself was a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis to instate higher consumer protections.
