Interchange Action Alert
Our grassroots efforts have been great, over 64,000 messages sent to the Hill and hundreds of visits with congressional representatives, but we will have to do even better. The retailers have turned loose their grassroots. They have also launched an aggressive PR campaign in Washington, D.C., and in selected states. This is trench warfare. We are matching them on the PR front, but we will have to overwhelm them on the grassroots side if we hope to succeed. It will take a combination of volume (we need bank employees to get involved – our goal is 100,000 contacts by the end of the month)
Goal #1 is to stop the Federal Reserve's proposal, which places a maximum12-cent cap on debit-card interchange fees and fails to take into account a bank's costs of providing debit card transactions. The proposal, and the law that it attempts to implement, are deeply flawed and could dramatically slash revenue that banks use to support basic checking accounts and other customer services. If the rule is approved as is, big-box retailers will continue to enjoy all the benefits of debit-card transactions without paying for the value they provide. They will not pass their savings on to consumers and as they pocket more profits, consumers will be forced to pay more for their banking services.