Visa and Mastercard agreed to reduce and cap credit card interchange fees as part of a landmark antitrust settlement with U.S. merchants, who say the deal could save tens of billions of dollars over the next five years.

“This settlement is the culmination of eight years of hard-fought litigation and detailed, painstaking negotiations,” Hilliard Shadowen LLP’s Steve Shadowen, co-lead counsel for the merchants, said in a statement. “It provides comprehensive market-based solutions to too-high swipe fees, while providing immediate fee relief to merchants as they make these new competitive tools work for them.”

As part of the settlement, which is still subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Visa and Mastercard agreed to roll back published “swipe fees” by at least 4 basis points for at least three years.

The credit card companies also agree to not raise fees above their levels at the end of 2023 for the next five years.

“By negotiating directly with merchants, we have reached a settlement with meaningful concessions that address true pain points small businesses have identified,” Kim Lawrence, Visa’s North America president, said in a statement.

Rob Beard, Mastercard’s chief legal officer, said the “agreement brings closure to a long-standing dispute by delivering substantial certainty and value to business owners, including flexibility in how they manage acceptance of card programs.”

These changes could save merchants at least $29.8 billion over the next five years, according to a statement issued by Shadowen and the other lawyers representing the merchants.

But Doug Kantor, general counsel at the National Association of Convenience Stores, told The Hill that the settlement would provide “very tiny and temporary relief” and “tries to cut off every other merchant with a lawsuit from being able to ask for more.”

“This is a very small group of lawyers who did not consult the broader universe of merchants that they were supposed to represent out there and just dropped this on everyone without taking into account the fact that merchants aren’t gonna like it, and there’s likely to be a lot of opposition to it,” Kantor said.

Instead, Kantor said there needs to be “a real market with real market forces” to bring price competition in the interchange market, referencing the ongoing lobbying fight on Capitol Hill over how to create more competition within the credit card interchange fee market continues on Capitol Hill.

Last summer, Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) reintroduced the Credit Card Competition Act, which would require massive financial institutions — defined as those with more than $100 billion in assets — to enable at least two network options for processing credit card transactions.

At least one of those must be an option other than Visa or Mastercard, which dominate around 80 percent of the credit card interchange market in the U.S.

Retailers have been rallying support for the bill against opposition from the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC), the trade group representing Visa, Mastercard and other credit card and union giants.

Richard Hunt, the EPC’s executive chair, said in response to the settlement that Durbin’s bill “continues to be unnecessary.”

“The agreement helps small businesses more than a haphazard, experimental piece of legislation that only benefits the largest corporate mega-stores ever would. Congress should put an end to the ill-advised Durbin-Marshall mandates and let the agreement merchants reached stand on its own,” Hunt said.

Kantor, who characterized the settlement as “Visa and MasterCard using the legal process as a sword and a shield to cut down other merchant claims,” disagrees.

“The best way to deal with this is for Congress to step in and make clear that there ought to be a competitive market,” Kantor said.

Updated at 11:14 a.m. EDT.