As many credit unions across the country have begun tore-evaluate their PIN debit networks in light of the DurbinAmendment regulations, it appears the largest card brand is alsoreevaluate its debit pricing.

Industry analysts are widely calling Visa USA's recentprocessing price change a clear attempt to hold on to merchantrouting business in the wake of the Durbin Amendment.

In a July 28 investors call, Visa executives laid out thepricing shift which both maintained the fixed cost on debittransactions for merchants as well as adding another fixed feewhile it cut the variable rate that merchants pay on debit cardtransactions.

Analysts have said that the move will essentially provide anincentive to merchants to continue to route transactions acrossVisa's PIN debit network, Interlink, when they begin to havecontrol over their transaction routing decisions.

Dubbed the network participation fee, the new fee will be afixed charge that will be applied to all Visa products and is basedon both the size of the merchant and number of merchant acceptancelocations.

However, the analytic firm Keefe, Bruyette and Woods said thatVisa could see a 5% drop in its PIN debit income if a large numberof debit card issuers decide to maintain only one PIN debit and onesignature debit network and thus switch away from Interlink toanother, unaffiliated, PIN debit network.

“We would note that we believe the whole discussion on thepricing change implications is relatively moot if bank issuersdecide to simply have one PIN network on the back of the card,” thefirm's analysts wrote in a recent note. “In this scenario theywould essentially swap out Visa PIN on all exclusive cards (whichmake a pretty significant amount of the total volumes outstanding)and replace those with a competing PIN network. Should thisscenario play out then Visa would not even be in the position toretain and compete for additional market share. In this case, thecompany would lose some part of about 5% of total revenues that arederived from exclusive PIN relationships.”