NEW YORK - Last week Heartland Payment Systems Inc. reiterated its plans to pass along savings to its merchant clients in what the card processing company is calling "Durbin Dollars."

"We are the company that is going to send every single dollar that was mandated in the Durbin legislation to the place it was intended, to our merchants€™ bank accounts," Heartland Chairman and CEO Robert O. Carr told analysts last Thursday during the company€™s second-quarter earnings conference call. "Heartland believes it is the right thing to do."

According to analysts, Heartland "could gain market share as a result of the new debit card rules, which the Federal Reserve Board finalized last month, because it uses a pricing model in which it passes along changes in interchange costs directly to merchants. Some acquirers charge merchants a marked-up cost," writes DigitalTransactionNews.com.

"Unlike other acquirers, which generally pursue 'bait-and-switch' pricing, Heartland's transparent interchange-plus model, coupled with its increasingly efficient captive sales organization, should fuel" revenue growth, wrote Andrew Jeffrey, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, in a May 2011 research report.

Carr added that Heartland should benefit from a new pricing structure that Visa Inc. announced last week. "I think it's good for Heartland," Carr told the news source, adding, "It's a little bit hard to know. The devil is in the details and we don't know all of them. But going to a flat model and a lower variable percentage is going to make the bigger merchant acquirers €¦ more competitive" and "allow us to pass on a lower cost."