Discover wants piece of China credit market

The Obama administration is weighing complaints from U.S. companies that China is violating trade rules by shutting them out of its $723 billion payment-processing market, Trade Representative Ron Kirk said March 26.

Kirk told reporters in Brussels that the U.S. hasn’t decided if it will file a complaint at the World Trade Organization over the rules, which block companies such as Visa Inc., American Express Co., MasterCard Inc., Riverwoods-based Discover Financial Services and First Data Corp. from processing credit- and debit- card transactions in China.

Those companies discussed with the trade office in recent weeks the argument that China is violating pledges, made when joining the WTO in 2001, to allow full access to that market, according to people familiar with the talks who asked not to be identified because the U.S. is still considering the issue. At stake is a market in which payment-card purchases surged more than 26-fold since 2002.