ATM suit against Visa, Mastercard resumes
An eight year-old antitrust suit is once again seeing some action after independent ATM providers requested class certification in their suit against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc.
The suit stretches back to 2011, when the National ATM Council and more than a dozen ATM deployers filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. They claimed that Visa and MasterCard network rules unlawfully prohibited ATM operators from charging lower fees for transactions over PIN-debit networks not affiliated with Visa or MasterCard.
The plaintiffs argued that the network rules amounted to price-fixing, artificially inflating consumer fees for ATM transactions, limiting ATM operator revenue and violating stipulations of the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibiting unreasonable restraints of trade.
One of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Jonathan L. Rubin, a partner at MoginRubin LLP in Washington, told Digital Transactions News that his clients are seeking "hundreds of millions" in damages.
While a district court dismissed the case, a federal appellate court in 2015 reinstated the deployers' lawsuit. Visa and Mastercard then elevated the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in November 2016 rejected their appeal.
Since then, the suit had been sitting in limbo. The reason being, the original plaintiffs were never certified as a class. The rules for certifying have only gotten stricter in the ensuing years. On Monday, Rubin filed a petition for certification of a class that would include non-bank ATM deployers and their affiliates.
The defendants have 90 days to respond to the plaintiffs' class-certification request, according to Rubin, who told Digital Transactions he expects the court will rule on it in mid-2020.
Visa and Mastercard did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ATM Marketplace.