First-order effects

• Visa issuers stand to receive up to $67M from Target, more than triple the amount the MasterCard banks refused, resolving the largest outstanding claim from the breach.
• Target must now negotiate a fresh MasterCard deal with the same large issuers whose rejection forced the higher price point.

Second-order effects

• The rejection tactic worked: by holding out, the biggest MasterCard issuers established that Target's per-network payouts scale with issuer leverage, strengthening their hand in the follow-on negotiation.
• Other breached retailers face a repriced template — issuing banks now have a demonstrated playbook of rejecting lowball settlements and waiting for the next network to set a higher floor.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, card networks consolidate into the de facto collectors of breach liability, with settlement size determined by issuer bargaining rather than the retailer's own cost disclosures — pushing retailers toward the kind of security commitments (network segmentation, two-factor authentication) regulators later demanded of Target.
• Breach remediation increasingly becomes a standing line item negotiated across multiple constituencies — customers, states, and each card network separately — rather than a single legal resolution.