DOJ files antitrust lawsuit against Visa for debit card business

Visa did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the lawsuit.

In the complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, prosecutors said Visa handles more than 60 percent of U.S. debit transactions, earning the company more than $7 billion in fees a year.

Visa’s use of “generous monetary incentives and threatening punitive surcharges” allow the company to maintain an illegal monopoly in the debit card processing market, prosecutors said.

The lawsuit follows a years-long investigation that followed Visa’s attempted acquisition of fintech company Plaid, which the Justice Department sued in 2020. The two companies abandoned the deal the following year.

Visa acknowledged that the Justice Department planned to investigate its US debit card business in a 2021 filing with the SEC.

A key issue under review is the use of security tokens, which can be used to block the routing of payments to other networks. Rival MasterCard settled a similar matter with the Federal Trade Commission in 2022.

While the Visa review predates the Biden administration, this latest action is one of a number of crackdowns on intermediary companies that the White House says are raising costs for American consumers.

“The anti-competitive behavior of corporations like Visa leaves the American people and our entire economy worse off,” Principal Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Mizer said in a statement. “Today’s action against Visa reminds those who would stifle competition instead of competing on price or investing in innovation that the Department of Justice will never hesitate to enforce the law on behalf of the American people.”