Visa is postponing the previously announced interchange rate and structure changes until April 2021. Here is a snippet from the Visa news release announcing the postponement: Given the unprecedented impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. economy, Visa determined it would not make any structural changes to the payments ecosystem over the last year. This included delaying previously announced changes to Visa’s published U.S. credit interchange rates and structure from April 2020 to April 2021.
Visa will be implementing these previously delayed updates in April 2021 with a small number of changes to reflect the evolution of digital payments to online, enhance security, and optimize acceptance and usage.
Specifically, we have decided to leave consumer credit card present retail rates unchanged in light of the fact that in-person retail continues to recover. In addition, Visa will provide a lower rate for certain card not present (CNP) consumer credit transactions processed using a Visa EMV Payment Token as of October 2021. Incentivizing greater use of tokens will improve e-commerce authorization rates and bolster security at a time when fraudsters are increasingly targeting digital and e-commerce channels.
The full Visa release can be found here.
