For all you business owners with merchant accounts, there is a very good news. The Federal Reserve Board has decided to cut down the fees from 44 cents to 21 cents. The fees that I am talking about are the ones that banks and credit card companies collect for each transaction.

While this is almost a 50% change in the fees, the banks were slightly relieved that the change wasn’t as much as 75%. Initially, Federal Reserve had laid out plans to cut the fee to 12 cents per transaction.

If you are a merchant, this should be a great sigh of relief since nowadays, a majority of payments are paid through credit/debit cards.

This fee cap is a direct result of an act called Dodd-Frank financial regulation act that was signed just few months ago in last July. Simply put, this law pushed Federal Reserve to investigate the amount of fees charged for debit card processing by the banks and card companies and whether they were reasonable or not.