Visa CFO Vasant Prabhu confident of resolving fee row with Amazon

Following news on Wednesday that e-commerce giant Amazon from Jan. 19 onward, the company will no longer accept Visa credit cards issued in Britain ” due to the high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions,” Visa Chief Financial Officer Vasant Prabhu expects to resolve its dispute with Amazon.com Inc and hopes to continue its co-branded credit card partnership with the e-commerce giant in the United States.

“We’ve resolved these things in the past and I believe we’ll resolve them in the future,” Vasant Prabhu said in an interview on Friday, adding: “It is our expectation that there will be a resolution so that UK consumers are not impacted.”

Amazon said in its Wednesday statement that credit card charges should be “going down over time with technological advancements, but instead, they continue to stay high or even rise.” Analysts have suggested its stance may be a negotiating tactic. In the past, other big retailers have settled fee disputes with Visa after announcing they were going to quit taking its credit cards in narrow segments of their businesses.

Walmart Inc’s unit in Canada, for example, said in 2016 it would stop accepting Visa credit cards after being unable to reach an agreement on fees. Seven months later the companies said they had settled the matter. Prabhu said reports on Wednesday suggesting the dispute was the result of an EU-enforced cap on fees no longer applying in the UK after Brexit was “entirely inaccurate.”

That rule applied to cross-border transactions between the EU and UK, whereas the dispute relates to domestic transactions, he said. In recent months, Amazon has also introduced surcharges on customers using Visa credit cards in Singapore and Australia, citing high fees, as the relationship between the two companies appeared to deteriorate.

Some analysts had expressed concern Amazon’s move in the UK could be a precursor to the retailer dropping Visa’s credit card in other territories, something Prabhu said he hoped would not materialize. “Restricting consumer choice doesn’t help merchants either,” said Prabhu. “If a merchant tells me I can’t use my preferred card that is not helpful to me as a consumer.”