Dive Brief:
- The administrator of a $5.5 billion class action settlement with Visa and Mastercard will produce a new quarterly report giving claims holders more visibility into the process.
- Class counsel for merchants that sued the card networks over interchange fees said Thursday they expect the first report by Epiq, the claims administrator, to be ready for the court by July 10. The report will detail data such as merchants’ claims status and fee disputes.
- “There is significant data-work that must be done to set in motion the ability to pull the various agreed reporting categories,” class attorney Alexandra Bernay from the law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd wrote in the Thursday letter to Magistrate Judge Joseph Marutollo of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York. The class will advise him if Epiq needs additional preparation time, Bernay said.
Dive Insight:
The 2018 settlement with Visa and Mastercard partially resolved a long-running antitrust case in which merchants alleged the two network giants charged excessive interchange fees when customers paid with a credit or debit card.
The class of merchant-plaintiffs numbers about 12 million and includes any U.S. business that accepted Visa or Mastercard-branded cards between Jan. 1, 2004, and Jan. 25, 2019. The settlement received final court approval for the damages portion of the case in 2019, with plaintiffs sending claim forms to about 18.6 million merchants ahead of a February 2025 claims deadline.
A separate part of the litigation– concerning injunctive relief for plaintiffs – is pending in the Brooklyn court, where U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan is considering preliminary approval of a settlement for that portion of the case.
Last month, Marutollo denied a February motion to compel detailed monthly reporting, which was filed by Cascade Settlement Services. The firm said it represents about 9,000 claims against the networks. But he directed the class counsel and Cascade’s lawyer to negotiate some form of periodic public reporting that would provide better insight into Epiq’s processing of claims.
The pace of settlement payments has become a source of frustration for some merchants, with the first disbursement occurring in February, one year after the claims deadline.
Cascade’s attorney, Kassra Nassiri, of the law firm Nassiri & Jung, did not respond to an email Friday seeking comment; nor did an Epiq executive overseeing the settlement.
The attorneys filed a draft of the reporting categories with their letter.
The quarterly report will include such information as the number of claims with tax identification numbers in dispute; how many claim research requests Epiq has pending; how many disputed TINs are pending with the special master in the case; and how much money has been distributed to merchants.
To date, the administrator has paid $414 million to about 598,000 merchants from an initial distribution that Cogan approved late last year, according to a May 26 court filing.
The plaintiffs have asked Cogan to approve a second disbursement totaling “at least $182 million” for about 84,000 claimants, according to their filing.
