Dive Brief:
- A federal judge approved a $197.5 million settlement Monday that resolves more than a decade of litigation against Visa and Mastercard over allegations that the networks colluded to limit competition in the ATM market and to keep access fees high.
- The class-action settlement endorsed by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon covers ATM operators and millions of consumers in separate cases that were handled in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It follows a failed effort by Visa and Mastercard last year to have the Supreme Court reconsider Leon’s decision to certify multiple plaintiff classes.
- Mastercard, based in Purchase, New York, is “glad to bring this matter to a close,” a company spokesperson said Monday in an email. Visa did not respond to emails seeking comment on the settlement.
Dive Insight:
The ATM operators’ litigation dates to October 2011 when The National ATM Council and ten companies that operate ATMs sued Visa and Mastercard. The plaintiffs alleged that the card networks’ contract provisions for access fees – imposed in 1996 – violated U.S. antitrust law.
ATM operators, including Just ATMs and Cabe & Cato, that used Visa or Mastercard routing to process transactions were bound by the networks’ access fee rules, according to the complaint. Those rules precluded them from passing along any savings to consumers in the form of lower ATM fees that they might have gained by routing a transaction over a network that wasn’t Visa or Mastercard.
Visa and Mastercard also faced later lawsuits from consumers over ATM fees they had paid, with those claims consolidated with the ATM operators.
“We are pleased and look forward to sending the money to the class and closing out this long-running case,” one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, Steve Berman of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, said Monday in an email.
The ATM litigation is among several antitrust lawsuits Visa and Mastercard have faced over the past 25 years, including cases over card swipe fees brought by merchants and a 2024 lawsuit by the Justice Department against Visa alleging it operates a monopoly in the debit card market.
Visa and Mastercard petitioned the Supreme Court in January 2024 to hear their appeal of Leon’s 2021 decision to certify three classes of plaintiffs in the case: ATM operators; consumers who said they had been charged access fees at independent ATMs; and consumers who had paid access fees at ATMs operated by banks.
A federal circuit court upheld Leon’s class ruling in July 2023. In April 2024, the Supreme Court declined to take up the matter, leading to the $197.5 million settlement for the ATM operators and consumers. Leon granted preliminary approval last July.
The National ATM Council, based in Jacksonville, Florida, and its executive director, Bruce Renard, did not respond to emails Monday seeking comment.
Also on Monday, Leon awarded $49.4 million in legal fees in the case, about $10 million less than the 30% of the total settlement attorneys had requested. The nearly $60 million that firms in the case sought “seemed a little generous,” Leon said at a fairness hearing on the settlement in January, according to court documents.
In 2022, Leon approved a $67 million ATM settlement with three large banks – Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo – related to the same allegations lodged against Visa and Mastercard.
