Visa adds platinum names to K Street roster

Visa is ramping up its lobbying in Washington, adding three big-name firms to its K Street roster.

The credit card company has added The Glover Park Group, Breaux Lott Leadership Group and Creative Response Concepts to its retained firms, recent registrations show. The most specific registrations state the groups will lobby on “corporate tax issues” and “issues related to credit cards, privacy, cyber security and tax issues.”

“We’re looking at legislative issues that affect the credit card industry, specifically interchange as data security, cybersecurity and tax issues,” a lobbyist who works for Visa told The Hill.

{mosads}Specifically, the lobbyist said that group would focus on interchange fees and cybersecurity issues that could affect the company. The lobbyist declined to comment on whether there had been collaborative sessions between the firms or on how the firms plan to lobby for Visa.

A Visa spokesman declined to comment and directed The Hill to the registration documents.

The hiring spree adds some marquee names to Visa’s lobbying stable, including former Sens. John Breaux (D-La.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.). Republican staffer Brian Gaston, who has worked for Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), is also among the lobbyists hired by the company.

The global payments corporation is no stranger to K Street. At least 11 outside firms reported lobbying for Visa in the last quarter of 2011, disclosure records show.

Those firms lobbied in the fourth quarter on a number of issues, including the Stop Online Piracy Act and the inter-change fee provisions of Dodd-Frank, which limit the fees that banks can charge for debit-card transactions.

Despite the three recent registrations, only Creative Response Concepts started lobbying for the firm in February. Breaux Lott Leadership Group’s registration is dated as beginning on Jan. 1, and The Glover Park Group backdated its registration to October 2011.

The Glover Park Group had not filed a fourth-quarter report to indicate it lobbied for Visa as of Tuesday morning, but The Hill was told that the fourth-quarter filing is being processed.

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