Some credit unions which are supposed to be sheltered from theimpact the Durbin Amendment's cap on debit interchange saw theirinterchange drop by collectively over $1 million in the thirdquarter of 2012, according to data collected by CUNA.

Although the association initially reported that only between 120 and 130 credit unionsparticipated, in fact 230 credit unions responded to an invitationfrom CUNA to share their debit interchange data and of those CUNAused data from 155, according to CUNA Chief Economist Bill Hampel.

“Some were not able to break out signature debit interchangefrom PIN debit interchange,” he said, explaining why some whoinitially responded were eventually not used.

“Some had changed processors during that period and were notable to collect the necessary data. If they did not have thedata we needed, we didn't use their data,” he added.

CUNA looked at the data across four time periods: the ninemonths from December 2010 to September 2011 provided a baseline forcomparison. Six months from September 2011 to March 2012 provideddata from the regulation's initial implementation and theassociation collected data from March to June 2012 and from June toSeptember 2012 which represented debit interchange under theregulation's full implementation.

Regulations implementing the Durbin Amendment's cap went intoeffect on Oct. 1, 2011. Regulations implementing processingchanges went to effect somewhat later.

The data from the 155 credit unions showed that while theirdebit interchange income increased across the quarter ending inJune 2012, it decreased by 1.4% in the quarter ending in September2012, translating into a loss of $1.38 million for the 155 creditunions in the quarter ending in September 2012.

This was despite seeing the overall number of debit cards issuedby the 155 credit unions increase by almost 165,000 over the samequarter.

CUNA is continuing to collect debit interchange data todetermine if this decline represented a one-time adjustment to thenew regulation or is the first sign of an ongoing trend.