WASHINGTON – In recognition of this week’s five-year anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) authored an opinion piece in Roll Call, touting the act’s success — particularly the eponymous amendment that “cut the average big bank debit card swipe fee in half and saved billions for Main Street businesses and consumers.

In the piece, he writes: “When the bill was being debated on the Senate floor, I offered an amendment on debit swipe fees — fees set by Visa and MasterCard that are paid by merchants to card-issuing banks whenever a purchase is made with a debit card. With no competition or transparency in this rigged system, swipe fee rates had soared. The cost to process a debit transaction is just a few pennies, but debit swipe fees were fixed at an average of 44 cents. By 2009, banks were collecting about $16 billion per year in debit swipe fees from merchants, who were forced to pass that cost on to their customers in the form of higher prices.”

Durbin goes on to describe how his amendment was meant to bring some reasonable regulation to this system, with the understanding that there needs to be a real choice of card networks available for each debit transaction.

At the time, banks threatened that this reform would kill the debit system, devastate small banks and credit unions, end free checking and hurt consumers. But five years later, it is clear that these dire predictions have not come to pass.

Write Durbin, “Swipe fee reform hasn’t killed the debit system. Debit card use continues to grow each year. … This reform gave small banks and credit unions a competitive advantage against the big banks. … This has helped level the playing field”.

He also points out an oft-cited 2013 study by economist Robert Shapiro estimating that debit swipe fees decreased by about $8.5 billion in 2012, with about $6 billion of these savings passed along from merchants to consumers in the form of lower prices.