The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection held a February 15th hearing on "The Law and Economics of Interchange Fees." The hearing, chaired by Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-FL), examined the rates that merchants pay for access to the electronic payment infrastructure that the payment card networks and thousands of other financial institutions have built over the last fifty years.

AFSA has joined forces with a number of financial institutions, credit card associations, banks and other trade groups to form the Electronic Payments Coalition, whose goal is to educate lawmakers on Capitol Hill on the many benefits of payment cards to the U.S. economy and to demonstrate why price controls would threaten the existence of an infrastructure on which both merchants and the consumer relies.

To explain why the actions of its critics would be detrimental, the EPC asked Timothy J. Muris, former Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and Professor of Law at George Mason University, to testify on its behalf at the February 15th hearing. Muris told the subcommittee that 1) electronic payments produce enormous benefits for consumers and merchants alike, 2) a fixed interchange fee is essential to the electronic payment card market, 3) as the recent experience in Australia demonstrates, federal, state, and local governments restructuring should not seek to regulate the price of interchange and 4) the current interchange fee price fixing litigation threatens the viability of the electronic payment card system as it exists today.