The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a new investigation that Visa is charging retailers more for not adopting the payment company’s own tokenization technology, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
Early in 2021, the DOJ launched an antitrust investigation into Visa to see whether it engages in anticompetitive behaviour in the debit card market.
According to the report, Visa’s tokenization technology replaces debit card numbers with tokens that can only be used with specific devices or merchants, replacing consumers’ sensitive account information with a special digital identity.
The dominance of Visa and rival Mastercard in the payments industry is coming under greater scrutiny.
The American Federal Trade Commission is looking into whether the security tokens used by Visa and Mastercard restrict the use of debit cards for online purchases.
The DOJ’s antitrust division had on May 2 requested more papers and information on Visa’s debit card policies in the US and its competition with other payment networks, the company said in a statement last month.
