WayTooHigh.com: Influencing Opinions and Raising Awareness

Today marks the third year since ScanMyPhotos.com launched WayTooHigh.com – The Credit Card Interchange Report. It is also about the time we received that infamous rate increase letter from Chase Paymentech which was sent to millions of merchants just like us.

Some rates have risen more than 300% in the past few years. The most recent rate “adjustment” letter arrived days ago, but does not identify the new fees until after they take effect. That sympathetic letter from our payment processing service announced a rate increase when cardholders had us process their affinity, frequent-flier signature cards; a quality causing retailers to effectively also be taken on a ride. That was the letter which led to The Wall Street Journal front-page Marketplace profile on our parent company [30 Minute Photos Etc.] and the beginning of our Federal class-action complaint against Visa, MasterCard and international major banks.

Changes have occured over the years. Merchant interchange rates have continued to ascend, while our traditional photographic film business wallowed due to the same technological shifts which made digital more practical.  These are the efficiencies which also helped bring down many antiquated analog services.  Next to film, the yellow page directories, fax machines and thousands of other businesses, the changing times also drew attention to the $40 billion annual merchant interchange debacle which didn’t budge.

But, unlike other businesses that were forced to change, the two giant credit card associations and their 80% market power kept trudging along.  Today, film, phone books and other once shining business models are historic vestiges from an antiquated past.  However, the electronic payment network, which today is super-fast, efficient and liberated from the days of manual credit card imprinters and carbon-copy receipts (that had to be mailed away for processing) remains.When you study the free interchange processing for checks, and international interchange rates that are a third and less the cost in the U.S., you quickly understand that Visa and MasterCard’s game – managed by thousands of member banks – is blemished.  Their anti-competitive price-fixing is illegal and drawing international attention and loud shouts from Washington D.C.

While this website has been written in our voice, as a retailer who best understands the issues, we have also become the leading personality and fixture behind the interchange battle.  And, it continues to gaining traction.  Visa and MasterCard restructured their companies, but the issues and fees remain as do their potential liability.The mix of banks, public relations and legal firms which read our comments each day is shared with close scrutiny by Visa, MasterCard, and much more importantly by other business owners, governments and associations around the world.  From giant multi-national conglomerates to “mom-and-pop” shopkeepers, we have been reporting, sharing commentary and observations with the world community which is also causing grief to Visa and MasterCard.  WayTooHigh.com and the nearly fifty other class-actions suits after we filed the first are shining a knock-down message that time is running out on the cartel’s imposing might.

Many of you have been following the shift in our business too – from film to digital and our extraordinary international media coverage for the new super-fast photo scanning business model we pioneered. From multiple articles in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and scores of other media coverage, the entrepreneurial passions at ScanMyPhotos.com was successful in making the leap from analog to digital. So, why hasn’t Visa and MasterCard also transitioned from an ancient , cost-based interchange fee structure to one that represents today’s technological realities?

In the late 1980’s technology evolved where transactions were processed electronically and paper records were not needed for most payment card transactions.  Since that time, the costs of various components of credit card transaction processing (phone, data processing and Internet services have decreased significantly.  These changes led to significant reductions in the costs of processing payment card transactions.

As class-representatives, on behalf of the millions of merchants with shared dedicated to eradicating supra-competitive interchange fees, we will continue to engage and call attention to this multi-billion dollar injustice.

News Update From ScanMyPhotos.com

Interchange Fees are Obsolete as VHS Video Tapes

During the holiday season, look around.  Can you find any VHS cassettes to record television programs on?  How about super-8mm movie film?  8-track tapes?  3 /12″ floppy discs?  Catching on?

Merchant interchange fees are one of the few holdouts from the pre technology explosion, from before TiVo, MySpace, Youtube and the iPhone.  The electronic payment network is today what computer storage devises were years ago.   With consumers increasingly relying on their computers to safe keep their valuable digital libraries, Western Digital’s My Book storage system provides users a safe place to secure up to one terabyte (1 TB) of digital content.  In the mid-1990’s that hardware would cost about a million dollars and fill an entire room, today it is under $500 and is the size of a few cell phones.   With “Moore’s Law”, technology is getting faster and prices cheaper.  Except, when you have unbridled market power and control a system that is obsolete.  It is like a drug addict who only knows how to stay in a daze. 

But, we are awaking Visa and MasterCard and reminding them that their once impenetrable interchange fee fiefdom is on the verge of distinction.  Other countries have got smart and demand rates be lowered, in some cases to a tiny fraction of those fees in the U.S., even though our nation is among the most technology advanced, our communications infrastructure should mean it costs less to transmit data, and third-world fraud rates have to be higher, yet they too pay a tiny fraction of our near record merchant interchange fee prices.  Technology today is so super-fast, just like our high speed ScanMyPhotos.com picture scanning – we cannot help but lower prices. 

Even though the banks are reporting huge problems from its mortgage mess, they would not be allowed to wield their anti-competitive power to artificially hold up what are now obsolete fees to help cover their other mistakes.  We understand that only about 13% of all interchange fees are used to actually cover the transactional costs. 

[Commentary: WayTooHigh.com] 

No Interchange Fee on Gift Cards

Especially during the holiday season speedily encroaching, more retailers are expected to promote their own electronic payment gift cards. Billions will be spend by consumers to purchase plastic gift cards that are unassociated with the electronic payment network.

In parallel to the two leading credit card associations, these cards share many of the same transaction and production costs, yet they are without interchange fees. Just like when writing a check, or using a debit PIN card in Canada, gift cards also abolished traditional interchange fees. 

The retailers understand the value of the cards without imposing those hidden fees that MasterCard and Visa demand.  But, if the card associations challenge our view by explaining that the fees are not hidden – they do post the fees on their website. We challenge them to find a large group of merchants who ever visited those pages and can easily understand the more than one-hundred pages of fees and schedules.

For our business, when a consumer wants a box of 1,000 photos scanned to a DVD, we charge $49.95. Period. ScanMyPhotos.com does not have a hundred page fee schedules. We cannot, after all – we are not controlled by thousands of banks and we do not illegally fix our prices by agreement with others.

Visa® and MasterCard® might argue that their member banks are part of a four-party system, with issuers, acquirers, cardholders and retailers all involved with each transaction. A retailer offering gift cards limit the activities and also much of the expense. However, when Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, for example, are both the acquirer and issuer, they are getting paid more.  Even realtors selling homes who are on both ends of a residential property sale adjust their fees downward, when they represent both parties.

While gift cards are without interchange fees, the banks are reaping extraordinary windfall profits from an antiquated payment system and because most consumers and merchants are entirely unaware that this is a $30 billion dollar annual scheme which Visa and MasterCard designed, control and are fighting to protect.  And, worst yet. How do most consumers pay for those interchange-free gift cards?  That’s right: with Visa and MasterCard, so the banks garner more windfall profits, even as retailers do not.