Card Use
* Payment card networks processed 53.7 billion debit and general-use prepaid card transactions valued at $2.07 trillion in the United States during 2013; dual-message networks processed 65.4 and 63.8 percent of the total by volume and value, respectively, with single-message networks processing the rest.
* Total transaction volume grew by 6.8 percent between 2012 and 2013, slower than the average per year growth of 10.2 percent between 2009 and 2012.
* Dual-message networks experienced faster transaction volume growth than single-message networks between 2012 and 2013, with growth rates of 9.1 and 2.6 percent, respectively.
* Card-not-present transaction volume grew substantially faster than card-present transaction volume between 2012 and 2013, with growth rates of 18.1 and 5.2 percent, respectively. However, card-not-present only accounted for 13.0 percent of transaction volume in 2013. As in previous years, the average transaction value for card-not-present transactions, $70.32 in 2013, was more than twice as high as for card-present transactions.
* The volume of transactions processed by issuers that are exempt from the interchange fee standard in Regulation II grew by 8.4 percent between 2012 and 2013, faster than the growth of 5.9 percent for transactions processed by issuers that are covered by the interchange fee standard.
* The growth in the volume of prepaid card transactions slowed significantly from 36.2 percent per year between 2009 and 2012 to 4.7 percent between 2012 and 2013
* Interchange fees, network fees, and incentives
* Average interchange fees per transaction for debit and general-use prepaid cards have not changed materially since the fourth quarter of 2011, when Regulation II took effect. In 2013, interchange fees totaled $16.33 billion.
* Network fees totaled $5.48 billion in 2013, a growth of 8.3 percent since 2012. Acquirers paid 57 percent of these fees; issuers paid the rest. Payments and incentives offered by networks totaled $1.25 billion in 2013, a growth of 1.6 percent since 2012. Issuers received 64 percent of these payments and incentives; acquirers and merchants received the rest.
Fraud
* Industrywide fraud losses to all parties of debit and general-use prepaid card transactions are estimated to have totaled $1.57 billion in 2013.
* Average fraud losses as share of transaction value increased slightly from 7.8 basis points to 8.0 basis points.
Issuer Costs
* Average authorization, clearing, and settlement (ACS) costs, excluding issuer fraud losses, across issuers covered by the interchange fee standard in Regulation II, calculated on a transaction- weighted basis, fell to $0.044 in 2013, down from $0.050 in 2011.
* The base interchange fee standard in Regulation II of 21 cents plus 5 basis points times the value of a transaction exceeded average per-transaction ACS costs, including issuer fraud losses, for 63.5 percent of covered issuers and 99.3 percent of covered transactions in 2013, down slightly from 66.0 and 99.6 percent, respectively, in 2011.
