Marketplace - Los Angeles,CA,USA.
Excerpt...
MasterCard recently went public, now Visa says it's planning to do the same. Ashley Milne-Tyte looks at why the biggest names in credit cards are going public now.
Right now the credit card giant Visa is basically a private membership club. It's controlled by a network of banks. But yesterday, Visa said it's gonna reorganize and become a publicly-traded company. MasterCard went public in May. So what's up with this? Ashley Milne-Tyte reports.
It's about the money. Visa is facing a lawsuit from merchants claiming the company charges them artificially high fees each time a customer uses a Visa. Going public means the banks who now own Visa are protected from legal claims. And there'll be plenty more of those says Robert Manning, author of Credit Card Nation.
[Source: Marketplace]
