Premium credit card users and small merchants could soon feel the effect of a decades-long battle over swipe fees.

A newly proposed settlement between Visa and Mastercard could reshape how much merchants—and ultimately, consumers—pay to use their payment networks, while giving stores more flexibility to treat high-end and mid-tier cards differently.

If approved by the court, the payment giants would reduce interchange fees by 0.1% over the next five years and cap standard consumer credit rates at 1.25% for eight years. It would also scrap a rule requiring merchants to accept all cards from a given network. That change could open the door for stores to reject credit card tiers—such as higher-fee, high-reward cards like the Chase Sapphire Reserve or Capital One Venture X —or furthe

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