Dive Brief:

• Visa and Mastercard have settled the last merchant lawsuits in an antitrust case over credit card swipe fees led by food-order service company Grubhub Holdings. A trial in the case was set to begin on Monday.
• Three remaining plaintiffs – the retailers Belk and BJ’s Wholesale Club Holdings and Uline, a packaging materials maker – settled their claims last week, according to federal court filings in the case. Grubhub Holdings, the lead plaintiff in the case, settled last month, according to an Aug. 27 filing by the company. Terms of settlements were not disclosed publicly.
• A Mastercard spokesperson said Wednesday that the network is “glad to have reached this resolution and look forward to continuing to grow our relationship” with Grubhub. A Visa spokesperson declined to comment. Attorneys with Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease, the Columbus, Ohio law firm that represented most of the plaintiffs, declined to comment.

Dive Insight:

The case in U.S. District Court in Chicago was brought by seven plaintiffs and their subsidiaries, part of an estimated 12 million merchants nationally that sought damages from the networks and banks over allegedly excessive interchange fees paid by the merchants when consumers made card payments. The lawsuit was filed in November 2019.

U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang of the Northern District of Illinois formally closed the litigation on Monday. 

Visa and Mastercard, the two largest U.S. card networks, had been in settlement talks most of the year with the plaintiffs, which included multiple pool and spa merchants that settled their claims in June, according to the court docket.

In April, the card networks settled a similar case in New York City involving a larger group of merchants that sued over the payment card fees they paid Visa and Mastercard.

The merchants in both the Chicago and New York matters had opted out of a prior settlement with the networks in 2012 and 2013. That settlement was valued at about $7 billion at the time, but they decided to pursue their own damage claims. 

A parallel case with largely the same merchant plaintiffs is still playing out over injunctive relief for the class in Brooklyn, New York.  

A federal judge in that case in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has set a Nov. 16 hearing to consider final approval of a settlement. Numerous large merchants and trade associations, including Walmart and the National Restaurant Association, oppose the pact and have asked the court to reject it.

Chicago-based Grubhub was purchased for $650 million last year by Wonder, a food-technology startup founded by billionaire Marc Lore, an e-commerce entrepreneur.