The Nation: You Swipe Card, Banks Swipe Cash
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/pages
Moreover, the Fed’s action essentially exempts debit-card swipes from the regulation. As Zach Carter explains at the Huffington Post, the 44-cent swipe fee average is actually a composite of two different averages. When you swipe your card at a store and choose “credit” and provide a signature, the average fee charged by banks is 56 cents. When you choose debit and enter a PIN number, the average fee is 23 cents.
Thus, by capping swipe fees at 24 cents, the Fed is basically freeing all debit card transactions from regulation. Retailers are not pleased. “The Federal Reserve very clearly did not follow through on the intent of the law,” Mallory Duncan, chairman of the Merchants Payments Coalition, told Carter. “The [Fed] board members are overwhelmingly bankers, so they decided to take several billion more from the public and give it to the banks,” he added in comments to The Hill.
Everytime money changes hands, some gets a cut. They are willing to spend lots of money lobbying to get, keep and increase their cut.