To make back some of that money, banks are weighing whether to divide debit-card services into components and charging for them separately-known as “unbundling.” For example, if merchants want a guarantee of payment, as approved debit transactions currently offer, that would cost extra.
In what we would expect to be a widely quoted response, one merchant organization stated the follows:
Unbundling “doesn’t make a lot of sense,” says general counsel for National Retail Federation, an industry trade group. “It seems a bit strange to take out something that’s intrinsic to a [debit] transaction. It’s like trying to separate a bark from the dog and selling the bark separately.”
We’re also not sure how this would work for PIN transactions either, where the authorization and settlement are contained in one message. Do financial transactions bark or will they bite?