The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

By Stephen Gandel

NEW YORK, July 8 (Reuters Breakingviews) - The behemoths of American finance face fewer battles in Washington these days. They should still pick them wisely. With roughly $200 billion of excess capital and a friendly White House, firms like JPMorgan JPM.N are hunting for acquisitions. Fiserv’s FISV.O debit-card networks, Star and Accel, are on the block and could unlock billions of dollars in transaction fees. Yet even this pay-off isn’t enough to merit a political tug-of-war with merchants.

Fiserv has stumbled over the past year. Last year, CEO Mike Lyons slashed the company’s expectations for growth in 2026 and launched a strategic review. Before it had a chance to wrap up, he departed to run Truist Financial. Pushy investor Jana Partners wants to see divestitures.

That puts the company’s debit-card networks up for grabs. Indeed, some big banks have taken a look, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The attraction comes down to a regulatory quirk.

The Durbin Amendment caps debit-card interchange fees for large banks. However, institutions that route transactions through their own networks are exempt. After acquiring the company last year, Capital One COF.N shifted most of its debit-card volume onto Discover Financial’s network, where interchange fees average roughly 1.2% of a transaction’s value, according to data from the Federal Reserve. That compares to an average of under 0.5% when constrained by the Durbin cap.

A similar move by JPMorgan, for instance, could be lucrative. The bank generated about $2 billion of debit interchange revenue last year. Routing those transactions through Star and Accel, at their current fee rates, would bump that up modestly. But the rest of the Durbin-exempt industry goes far further, charging an average rate of 1.2%. Assume the bank run by Jamie Dimon does likewise, and it could generate nearly $6 billion in fees, Breakingviews calculates.

The problem is that this upside may be illusory. Merchants carry serious political weight and have won concessions from giants Visa V.N and Mastercard MA.N in court. The Trump administration may go easy on regulation in the abstract, but a pitched battle between powerful interests is another matter. Smaller-bank customers may also shun networks owned by big competitors. Worse, emerging technologies like stablecoins are poised to upend the industry.

In 1970, Stanford University researchers offered children a test: have a marshmallow now, or withstand temptation for 15 minutes and get even more treats. Those who showed self-control supposedly went on to do better in life. With JPMorgan generating $182 billion of annual revenue, even a few billion dollars of incremental card fees only move the needle so much. There will be more to play for later.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Fiserv is looking to offload its payments infrastructure business, the Wall Street Journal reported on July 6. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo are among the banks who have taken a look at the unit, which processes debit card transactions between banks, merchants and consumers, according to the report.