The American Banker, "First Data, Banks Facing Calif. Suit Over ATM Charges"

          The arguments in the lawsuit, filed July 2 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, are familiar. One is that the collective setting of interchange, the fee that a bank agrees to pay when a depositor withdraws cash from another company's ATM, violates antitrust law. Another is that by charging interchange on top of an ATM surcharge, banks are "double-dipping."
          Joseph R. Saveri, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the suit, said, "As far as we can tell, there's no purpose for the interchange fees, now that surcharges have" taken off, permitting banks to recoup their expenses from foreign ATM transactions. "If there was competition and these fees weren't being collectively agreed to, they'd be competed down to virtually zero."