On Wednesday, May 29, 2024, counsel for a class of United States ATM users – estimated to be hundreds of millions of people – reached a settlement with Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. related to alleged anticompetitive rules concerning the setting of ATM fees.
The case concerned Visa and Mastercard rules that prohibited ATM operators from offering lower access fees to cardholders when transactions are processed over competing, lower cost ATM networks. Coherent Founder and Chairman Dr. Alan Frankel and Coherent were retained as consulting experts to assist class counsel and collaborated with a team at Compass Lexecon to support testifying expert Dr. Dennis Carlton. Coherent provided deep industry expertise, as well as sophisticated data processing and analytics, in analyzing large amounts of data produced in the litigation by defendants and third parties.
This settlement, combined with an earlier $66.7 million settlement reached with JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., and Bank of America Corp. in 2021, brings the total value of settlements in this matter to over $264 million.
Plaintiffs in this matter were represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, and Mehri & Skalet. Dr. Frankel was supported by a team at Coherent Economics that included Megan Hart, Jack Kurila, and several others.