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A federal district court has entered final judgment in financial institutions' class action over the 2013 Target Corp. breach, pushing the final tab Target will pay to $59 million.

Parties reached a $39 million settlement in December to resolve the dispute over the breach, which exposed some 40 million credit and debit cards and the personal data of up to 110 million consumers to potential fraud. The full cost to financial institutions has yet to be determined. The final judgment, entered last Friday, adds attorney's fees and payments to class representatives.

Carrie Hunt, NAFCU's executive vice president of government affairs and general counsel, while praising plaintiffs' win, emphasized that a real solution on merchant data breaches involves national data security standards for everyone in the payments chain.

"In the nearly three years since Target's huge data breach, consumers remain extremely susceptible to cyberattacks," said Hunt. "We continue to urge Congress to protect consumers' financial information by enacting national data security standards for retailers and holding them directly accountable for their data breaches.

"Much more needs to be done to protect consumers and make credit unions whole," Hunt continued. "Litigation is not the answer, and it is a poor substitute for much-needed data security standards for retailers."

The U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, in its final judgment entered last Friday:

• approved the December settlement between Target and financial institution plaintiffs;
• granted plaintiffs' motion for $19.9 million in attorney's fees and awards;
• approved a service payment of $20,000 to each of the five settlement class representatives (including one credit union, CSE Federal Credit Union);
• dismissed the case with prejudice.

This has been described as the first case in which financial institutions have obtained class certification and a settlement against a retailer that suffered a data breach. Combined with the attorneys' fees, the settlement creates about $59 million in overall monetary class benefits.

NAFCU, the first financial trade association to call for national data security standards for merchants, and it continues to push for the passage of legislation – the "Data Security Act" – to create standards for merchants similar to those applied to credit unions and other financial institutions under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.