Irony In 7-Eleven Interchange Complaint Posted by AVCU on 4:49 PM

Bruce Cundiff, Director of Payments Research at Javelin Strategies, posted a blog entry last week throws the ball back at retailers who want Congress to artificially control interchange assessed to merchants by card networks. He cites the case of 7-Eleven chain, which has begun a petition drive against interchange in an effort to make it a "consumer issue" instead of a banking issue. Mr. Cundiff points out the irony of 7-Eleven's public effort to restrict interchange while being involved in a data breach most of us never heard about.
Cundiff reports that 7-Eleven was victim of a data breach in August 2007 resulting in the theft of an undetermined number of credit/debit card numbers and related data. He then goes on to strongly suggest that companies like 7-Eleven should get their own house in order to protect their customers' data before seeking their support to minimize interchange, which helps defray rising costs of fraud borne by card issuing institutions. See Mr. Cundiff's story here, and note that the link to Javelin Strategy headlines under "Other Blogs We Follow" to the right of this page.