Credit Card Competition Act will disproportionately hurt small businesses

As a mother-daughter duo who wanted to share our love of Italian ice with our community in Georgia, we could not be prouder of the success our business has been able to achieve thanks to the support it has received from our community. Kayla’s Italian Ice started with nothing more than $100 and a pushcart, and we focused on gaining our customers’ trust with every scoop we served. As a result, we turned that $100 investment into a thriving business, outgrew our pushcart to a food truck, and started securing corporate contracts.

We know that our success could not have happened without credit cards and digital payments, especially during the hotter months when our demand goes up. As our clientele grew, we started using credit cards to cover various business expenses like buying ingredients and investing in equipment to improve our service. Using credit cards to cover our expenses allowed us to earn rewards, which we used to support our bottom line. In addition, having a credit card also helped us establish business credit, making us more trustworthy to potential lenders when it came time for us to secure the money to buy our truck, which further propelled our success.

In addition, we depend on the digital payments system to provide our customers an easy way to quickly and securely process transactions. Our customers know that when they swipe or tap their cards at our food truck, their financial data will be safe. This safety net builds trust with our customers, enhances the customer experience, and keeps us safe by reducing our reliance on cash. And when we use our business credit card to cover transactions, we know our information will be protected from potential scams and data breaches, thanks to the security that the current payment system offers.

Unfortunately, lawmakers in Washington are considering a bill called the Credit Card Competition Act, which will put at risk the tools we have relied on to drive our business to success and to build a loyal customer base. The bill’s supporters say it will help small businesses save money, but in reality, this measure will disproportionately hurt small businesses like ours.

Involving alternative payment networks that are unlikely to provide the same security as the current system makes me particularly concerned about the impact that this bill could have on the safety and security of digital payments. Given that most of our sales come from customers paying digitally, we value not only the convenience of the system, but also its reliability and security. If a transaction gets flagged as fraudulent, banks can often take care of it without hurting our bottom line. But if the bill becomes law, we could lose this safety net and our customers’ trust. All it takes is one scam attempt for a customer to stop trusting us.

I’m also concerned about how this bill will hurt the credit card rewards points our business uses to cover our expenses. We use our credit card for expenses like equipment and truck maintenance because earning rewards points when we pay for them helps lower our costs. For us, rewards programs are not just a perk, they’re essential. Small businesses like ours often run on tighter profit margins, so using credit card rewards points directly supports our bottom line. Losing them would increase our business costs.

As business owners who have been able to leverage the digital payments and credit card system to advance our success, we want to urge our Georgia Senators to oppose this bill. It would hurt the important financial resources small businesses in Georgia, and all over the nation, use to stay afloat.

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