Certificate Clearing Corporation (CCC) is now purchasing claims in the Visa/Mastercard class action (aka the Payment Card Interchange Fee Antitrust Litigation). If you received a notice, you may know that the value of your claim will depend on the amount of interchange fees you paid during the the 2004-2019 class period. But there are other key factors working to determine what your claim will be worth.

To make our bids for claims—and maybe your claim—we have to consider two key variables:

·      the expected participation rate for the settlement, and

·      the collective interchange fees of all possible claimants over the class period.

Let’s start with the participation rate, also known as the redemption rate.

The math is simple: If 100% of the eligible class participates, then the pie is cut up for all class members. In the Visa Mastercard settlement, the class is over 18 million entities. That means the settlement fund (after attorneys fees and administrative costs) will be divided into 18 million pieces. And if the redemption rate is 1%, then the fund will be divided into 180,000 pieces. Simple, huh?

Now here is the complicated part: the interchange fees.

Different companies of different sizes accept credit cards, of course. That covers everyone from the hot dog stand down the street to mega box stores across the country to online retailers based who-knows-where. Each eligible class member will have a settlement award proportional to their number of transactions made and fees paid during the 2004 to 2019 class period.

This variable is known as the “pro rata amount,” and means that whether the fund is cut into 18 million pieces or 180,000 pieces, the box store (big pro rata) will have a much, much larger slice of the pie than the local hot dog stand (small pro rata).

The financial analysts at CCC have spent many years studying this case and the economic backdrop of the fifteen year period in which the class period takes place. We have sophisticated estimates about the amount of Visa and Mastercard swipes that occurred each year and equally sophisticated estimates of the interchange fees chared over time as well. Over 30 years in the class action settlement industry helps too (cough-cough).

When we make a bid for your claim, we make it with the following factors in mind:

·      What was your revenue in the class period?

·      How much of that was via Visa and/or Mastercard charges?

·      How much is this compared to the overall size of the transaction fees in the class period?

And here is the kicker, the big estimate, the number our analysts spent many sleepless nights and long drives contemplating, the one that we believe will truly determine your recovery in this settlement:

·      What will the participation rate be?

This is not a consumer class action, which often have poor participation rates due to their low recovery potentials and lackadasical notice process. This is a well-known case whose class entirely consists of businesses devoted to the bottom line. The 18-million-entity class includes many, many large and savvy businesses, and their slices of pie will be big indeed. The settlement itself has been in the news for years, and small business owners throughout the United States have been tracking the litigation since it began. They too are savvy operators and do not intend to let the claim form disappear into the recycling basket.

For these reasons and more, we are assuming the participation rate will very high, and are willing to offer a competitive price for your claim.

Give us a call today at 312-204-6969 and we can eliminate the wait for your slice of the pie.