FTC Orders Mastercard to Stop Debit Practices that Stifle Competition

In a new order, the Federal Trade Commission has mandated Mastercard to end illegal business tactics it has been using to force merchants to route debit card payments through its payment network.

The order, which was announced on Wednesday, demands that Mastercard end the practice of blocking the use of competing debit payment networks. The payment giant is also required to “start providing competing networks with customer account information they need to process debit payments.”

The FTC alleged that Mastercard has been using the practice, which violates provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act known as the Durbin Amendment and its implementing rule, Regulation II, to keep other payment companies out of the ecommerce debit payment business.

“This is a victory for consumers and the merchants who rely on debit card payments to operate their businesses,” said Holly Vedova, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “Congress directed the FTC to enforce this part of the Dodd-Frank Act and prevent precisely this kind of illegal behavior. We take this responsibility seriously, as demonstrated by our action today.”

The FTC said in a statement on Friday that Mastercard, by trying to monopolize debit payment, is trying to stifle competition in the US payment market. The regulator said the Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 to stop dominant payment companies from completely ruling the $4 trillion industry.

Debit Card Payment Networks

With more than 80 percent of American adults carrying at least one debit card and over $4 trillion in debit card purchases made every year, debit cards occupy a significant place in the current payment landscape. The popularity of debit cards has been growing especially quickly for purchases consumers make using their personal devices equipped with ewallet applications such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet.

Payment card networks play a critical role in those debit card transactions. When a customer presents their debit card to make a purchase, the network transmits the payment information to the card’s corresponding bank for approval, and then transfers the payment approval or denial back to the merchant. Payment card networks compete for the business of banks that issue cards and for the business of merchants that accept card payments.

Mastercard, along with Visa, is one of the two leading payment card networks in the United States. The processing fees charged by networks total billions of dollars every year, affecting every purchase made with a debit card, according to the FTC. Most of these fees are paid by the merchants to the card-issuing banks and the payment card networks.

To spur more competition among payment card networks, Congress enacted a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act known as the Durbin Amendment, which required banks to enable at least two unaffiliated networks on every debit card, thereby giving merchants a choice of which network to use for a given debit transaction. The Durbin Amendment—along with its implementing rule, Regulation II—also bars payment card networks from inhibiting merchants from using other networks.

The Commission also outlined “illegal tactics” that Mastercard has been using to dominate the market. The agency alleged that Mastercard uses “tokenization” to block the use of competing payment card networks. In addition, Mastercard refuses to provide conversion services to competing networks for remote ewallet debit transactions.

Mastercard’s Illegal Tactics

With the post-Durbin rise of debit ecommerce and ewallet debit transactions, Mastercard was flouting the law by setting policies to block merchants from routing ecommerce transactions using Mastercard-branded debit cards saved in ewallets to alternative payment card networks, including networks that may charge lower fees than Mastercard, the FTC alleged.

Specifically, Mastercard used its control over a process called “tokenization” to block the use of competing payment card networks, the agency alleged. Transactions commonly are “tokenized” by replacing the cardholder’s primary account number with a different number to protect the account number during some stages of a debit transaction.

Tokens are stored in ewallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Wallet and serve as a substitute credential to provide additional protection for a cardholder’s account number.

When a debit cardholder makes a debit purchase using an ewallet, the merchant receives a token from the cardholder’s device and sends it to the merchant’s bank, which in turn sends the token to a payment card network for processing. For the transaction to proceed, however, the network must be able to convert the token to its associated account number.

Mastercard’s policy requires use of a token when a cardholder loads a Mastercard-branded debit card into an ewallet, while banks issuing Mastercard-branded debit cards nearly universally use Mastercard to generate the tokens and store the corresponding primary account numbers in its Mastercard “token vault,” the FTC alleged. Since competing networks do not have access to Mastercard’s token vault, merchants are dependent on Mastercard’s converting the token to process ewallet transactions using Mastercard-branded debit cards.

According to the FTC, Mastercard refuses to provide conversion services to competing networks for remote ewallet debit transactions (i.e., online and in-app transactions, as opposed to in-person transactions made by the customer in a store), thereby making it impossible for merchants to route their ewallet transactions on a network other than Mastercard.

These practices, the FTC said, violate the law, prompting the order which will give other players a level playing ground in the market. The order prohibits Mastercard from carrying on with te practices.

Under the FTC consent order, when a competing network receives a token to process a debit card payment, Mastercard is required to provide them with the customer’s personal account number that corresponds to the token. The order also bans Mastercard from taking any action to prevent competitors from providing their own payment token service or offer tokens on Mastercard-branded debit cards and requires Mastercard to comply with provisions of Regulation II.