| Sumario: | A jury trial due to start in New York in May 2003 was settled out of court when Visa and MasterCard, the world's two biggest credit-card associations, agreed to pay $3 billion in compensation to retailers and to lower their charges for certain payments. That ended a class action led by Wal-Mart, on behalf of nearly 5 million American retailers. The plaintiffs' real victory, however, was to force Visa and MasterCard to lower their fees for offline debits. The retailers claim that the credit-card associations have been forcing them to give customers complete freedom to choose whether they use credit or debit cards, and whether they verify their identities electronically or with their signatures. This may sound harmless, but the retailers say that one method of payment has cost them collectively billions of dollars a year in unnecessarily high charges--which they have passed on to their customers. At issue were the so-called interchange fees that Visa and MasterCard levy from retailers, on behalf of issuing banks, every time one of their customers uses a debit or credit card. The safest and most efficient payment method, from the retailer's point of view, is a debit card combined with a PIN (personal identification number) punched by the customer into an online device at the point of sale.
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