The “Stop Sticking It To Us” Coalition, representing over 200,000 Canadian businesses, small, mid and large, says it is gathering in Ottawa this week to combat overcharging by VISA and MasterCard.
The reason why is because the U.S.-based credit card companies have been pushing worldwide to take over the debit card business and increase service charges on credit card transactions. For or example, currently in the U.S. Visa and MasterCard now control over 75% of the debit card market. U.S. merchants and customers pay heavily for the card company’s dominance of that market. Debit transaction fees are (on average) anywhere from 20-50 cents in the U.S. In contrast, most Canadian Merchants pay from 8-15cents on average for a debit transaction – that’s a huge percentage increase!
My question to you is will your business be in Ottawa this week…?
Is protecting our Made-in-Canada, not-for-profit debit card system (Interac) a key objective for your business…?
Love to hear the thoughts directly from the Merchants. Add you comments below.
