【出版时间及名称】：2009年11月美国金融技术行业研究报告
        【作者】：Fox-Pitt证券
        【文件格式】：PDF
        【页数】：30
        【目录或简介】：
Don’t think anything will happen right now… mostly because we believe (1) the issue and
potential solutions will need to be studied at greater length with a measured implementation – if one,
(2) the banking lobby is quite strong and likely hasn’t applied too much pressure to date, (3) the
initial impact will be a loss of revenue for banks, which are currently in a weakened position, and (4)
there is no real evidence that consumers will benefit from lower pricing.
• …But, this issue won’t go away. While we do not believe regulation of interchange rates is
eminent, we also don’t believe that this issue will go away. Merchants continue to state that cards
costs are one of the largest costs of doing business and that interchange rates are set in an
anticompetitive format. With the next step in the debate being a report by the GAO, we suspect that
the GAO will frame the benefits of the card system while also pointing to some inefficiency. In the
end, we see the report leaving the issues open, rather than putting closure to the issues.
• What could happen to the players. Should regulation materialize, we believe that the card issuers
will be most directly impacted initially. In turn, we believe that banks will look to pass the increased
costs (or reduced fee income) on to card users through lower rewards programs and annual fees. In
addition, we suspect that there will be some pricing pressure on the networks (but don’t view this as
significant savings for the banks). On the flip side, we do believe that merchants would reap the
benefits of lower interchange rather than pass on the savings to all consumers. At this point, we
think changes will have little impact on merchant acquirers and cash consumers.
• How much are we talking? While fees to banks could be cut by $16 billion (the net effect should
be closer to $4 billion as some offsets potentially available), we estimate the impact to the networks
much lower at around 2.5%/3.5% of earnings. Despite this, we continue to be very positive on the
networks and continue to view the long-term growth opportunity as attractive. That said, we believe
it is a question of when to buy these companies, not should we buy these companies. We put entry
points on Visa (V-$80-In Line) at $68 to $69 and on MasterCard (MA-$234.72-Outperform) at $220
to $222.