On Thursday, Demand Progress applauded the passage of legislation in Colorado that would limit swipe fees, part of a broad effort to break the stranglehold that payment processors and big banks have on the credit card business.
The new law, the Swipe Fee Fairness and Consumer Safeguards Act, bans swipe fees – the money merchants pay to process credit card transactions – from being applied to sales tax, on the grounds that businesses are simply passing this money on to the government, not benefiting from it.
“The payment system in the United States is a hot monopolized mess that makes hundreds of billions for Visa, Mastercard, and the big banks but is awful for small businesses and consumers,” said Carter Dougherty, senior fellow for antimonopoly and finance at Demand Progress. “Colorado’s legislation demonstrates the need for an ongoing effort, at the state and federal level, to gang-tackle this system from all sides and reform how we all pay for goods and services.”
U.S. merchants paid a record $198.25 billion in 2025 to process credit and debit transactions, up from $187.2 billion in 2024, money that eventually comes out of consumer pockets. Demand Progress, along with many other consumer, antimonopoly, and small business groups, supports fundamental reform of this system, above all with the Credit Card Competition Act, a bipartisan federal effort to break the Visa-Mastercard duopoly on card processing.
State efforts to curb swipe fees are also critical, as are fighting federal regulations that defend big-bank privileges and a long-running attempt to foist a bad legal settlement on consumers and small businesses. Demand Progress has:
- Rallied consumer, antimonopoly, and small business groups to support the Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul, in his defense of a state law banning swipe fees on taxes and tips
- Criticized an attempt by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal big-bank regulator, to use federal authority to invalidate the Illinois law
- Pushed back against an attempt by big banks to win judicial approval for a legal settlement to long-running litigation that would bless the anticompetitive process by which swipe fees are set
- Spoken out repeatedly about the oligopoly of credit card issuers and the duopoly of payment processors
- Filed amicus briefs in support of efforts to reverse the bank-friendly implementation of the 2010 Durbin Amendment