Karen Petrou: How DOJ’s Case Against Visa Could Make Debit-Card Markets Still More Concentrated
In our recent paper on bank-merger policy, we noted that over-stringent merger policy is likely to lead to unintended and perverse consequences. This emphatically is not to say that all bank mergers are good mergers, but rather to emphasize that blocking all mergers based on arbitrary criteria may well backfire and lead to still-greater concentration in a market defined as much by regulatory-arbitrage opportunities as competitiveness. Case in point: Justice may rightly want to bring Visa to heel, but its bank-merger policy could simultaneously block the kinds of bank consortia that would otherwise be able to continue market-critical card processing and also bring it under the regulatory umbrella. If DOJ successfully sues Visa, its bank-merger policy is likely to replace one disgraced omnipotent network-effect competitor with another omnipotent network-effect competitor rather than one or more regulated networks comprised of regulated, competing banks.
One of the often-overlooked – but very important – aspects of new merger policy from the Department of Justice is its dark view of financial networks and platforms. These are of course most pertinent in the payment system where, as one payment executive recently put it, “payment is a matter of volumes. If you don’t have volumes, you don’t have the capacity to be competitive.” Put another way, payment systems are network-effect entities and, unless Justice understands this, the only bank payment-system providers will be one or more of the very biggest banks that don’t need third-party networks to generate scale. Existing bank consortia of different-sized …