WASHINGTON–It’s a quiet week in Washington with the House adjourned and the Senate now dealing with a $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
There are no hearings scheduled.
As a result, America’s Credit Unions reported it is focusing instead on regulatory issues and, in particular, the Fed’s Reg II proposal, which seeks to reduce the regulated debit interchange cap and which is strongly opposed by credit unions and other financial services organizations.
“That’s going to be a very consequential rule for credit unions and we are trying to educate policymakers about that,” said America’s Credit Unions’ SVP-Advocacy Greg Mesack. “By the end of next week we will have met with every single member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to have educational meetings about this proposed rulemaking.”
Mesack said credit unions are also meeting with their congressional representatives in their home districts and states.
“There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes,” said Mesack.
Effect Being Felt
In response to a question from CUToday.info, Mesack said he believes the meetings with the Federal Reserve will have an effect on the final rule.
One point he said America’s Credit Unions has stressed is that while the Fed in making its proposal seem to suggest it needed to do so to comply with Dodd-Frank, that is not the case.
He said the trade group has also “done a good job of pointing out that their analysis and their data was rather flawed and, second of all, it was incomplete, because when they proposed this rule they had not yet taken into account a major change that was taking place just last June” with card not present rules, Mesack said.
Bad Methodology Suggested
“The impact of what that had meant for institutions with fraud and other issues was not reflected in the data set that was used to calculate the percentages,” Mesack continued.
He added that the group also shared other factors that go into managing a credit card program, and said the methodology used by the Fed to measure transaction processing costs is inaccurate.
Quarter-Million Donation
Separately, during the National Credit Union Roundtable that is being hosted by the trade group this week, Mesack noted TruStage donated $250,000 to help fund the fight against the Credit Card Competition Act in Congress, which credit unions also strongly oppose.