Visa and Mastercard have settled the final interchange fee claims from a group of about five dozen merchants in recent weeks in an antitrust case that had been set for trial this month.
The last merchant settlement came this week as Circle K parent Alimentation Couche-Tard resolved its damage claims against the networks in a New York case that dates to June 2013.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York formally closed the litigation on Wednesday, after Amtrak, Crate & Barrel, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Nike and other merchants settled their claims over the past six weeks. Settlements in the New York case, which have come in several batches over the past decade, cover about 65 merchants total.
A second group of merchants, led by the food-order service GrubHub Holdings, is in settlement discussions with the defendants, according to the court docket after a discussion the parties held last month with the court. That case is set for trial Sept. 14 in Chicago before U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang.
“The Court urges the parties in the strongest terms to advance settlement negotiations as promptly as possible,” Chang wrote March 24, setting another status hearing for May 26.
The Chicago case covers about 28 plaintiffs, 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.
Attorneys from the merchant plaintiffs' firms, Constantine Cannon and Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease of Columbus, Ohio, declined to comment on the New York settlements. Another firm that represented some of the merchants – Shinder Cantor Lerner – did not respond to messages seeking comment.
In a related move, Visa this week announced a share exchange program for its Class B shares, which are held primarily by banks and credit unions to help cover the company’s merchant litigation costs. The funding mechanism dates to Visa’s public stock offering in March 2008.
Visa’s share exchange – the second since 2024 – shows that Visa is making progress in its litigation settlement efforts, Baird Equity Research analyst David Koning said Tuesday in an interview. The company has probably settled claims that cover more than 90% of its payments volume, he said.
Visa made $4.2 billion in settlement payments between October 1, 2023 to March 31, 2026, from its litigation escrow account, the company said Monday in a regulatory filing outlining the share exchange offer.
The payments cut by half the “estimated interchange reimbursement fees at issue in unresolved claims for damages in the U.S. covered litigation,” San Francisco-based Visa said in the filing.
A Visa spokesperson said Wednesday that the company had no comment on the merchant settlements or litigation fund. A Mastercard spokesperson didn’t immediately have a comment.
The merchants in both the New York and Chicago cases had opted out in 2012-2013 of a prior settlement with the networks, valued at about $7 billion, to pursue their own damage claims. While that case covers damages, a parallel case with largely the same merchant plaintiffs is still playing out over injunctive relief for the class in Brooklyn, New York.
A proposed settlement in that matter will be discussed at an April 27 hearing. A prior settlement over injunctive relief was rejected by a federal judge in June 2024 because it didn’t treat merchants equitably relative to each other.
