The highest court in America backed AmEx's policy of preventing retailers from offering customers incentives to pay with cheaper cards. AmEx has faced a decade of litigation alleging that its higher fees have "anticompetitive effects" on merchants. The ruling implies that merchants may have a difficult time trying to commoditize the interchange fees associated with credit card payments.
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Supreme Court Rules for American Express in Swipe-Fee Antitrust Case
An AmEx loss would have given merchants significant leverage against the company because they could have asked consumers to pay with other lower-fee cards in exchange for discounts or other incentives. Shoppers now won’t receive such offers. The ruling is also a setback for the merchants’ broader ambitions to take on credit card swipe-fees, also known as interchange fees. While debit card swipe fees were capped by legislation as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the AmEx case was viewed by merchants as a way of lowering the interchange fees they incur from credit cards.
