Visa and Mastercard Face £700 Million UK Claim Over EEA Card Fees

A proposed £700 million collective claim against Visa and Mastercard was filed at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal on October 8, 2026. It is brought on behalf of about 126,000 UK businesses that accepted online or other remote card payments from customers whose cards were issued in the European Economic Area. According to the announcement from law firm Geradin Partners, the claim alleges that the two card schemes overcharged those businesses after Brexit, and that the overcharge grew from October 2021.

The claim is led by Ann Pope, who was the Competition and Markets Authority’s Senior Director for Antitrust from 2014 to 2024. She acts through Ann Pope Collective Proceedings Limited, the company named as proposed class representative, and is represented by Geradin Partners. The claim says the higher fees have cost UK businesses £150 million to £200 million a year.

The fee at the center of the claim

When a shopper with a card issued in, say, France or Germany buys online from a UK business, the merchant’s bank pays an “inter-regional” interchange fee to the bank that issued the card. Visa and Mastercard set the default level of that fee. Interchange is only one part of what a merchant pays per transaction; our explainer on where a card fee goes breaks down the rest.

Until the end of 2020, these payments counted as transactions inside the EEA, and EU rules capped the fee at 0.2% for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards. The UK’s payments regulator, the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR), set out what happened next in its December 2024 final report: from January 2021 the EU cap no longer applied to UK-EEA payments, Visa raised the fees for online payments with EEA cards at UK merchants in October 2021, and Mastercard followed in April 2022. The new levels were 1.15% for debit and 1.5% for credit, roughly five times the old caps. On a £100 online sale paid with an EEA debit card, that is £1.15 of interchange instead of 20p.

The claim argues that nothing about the cost of these payments justified the jump. The UK stayed in the Single Euro Payments Area, so, the claimants say, processing an EEA card payment at a UK business cost substantially the same after Brexit as before. Geradin Partners also says the tribunal has already found inter-regional fees charged by Visa and Mastercard to be unlawful in a separate case.

What the regulator found

The PSR’s market review concluded that Visa and Mastercard were not subject to effective competitive constraints when they raised the fees, that the increases cost UK businesses £150 million to £200 million a year, and that it could find no justification for them. It decided that a price cap was the only effective remedy.

No cap is in force yet. In October 2025 the PSR dropped its plan for an interim cap and said it would impose a cap in one step once it had settled a method for setting the level. In the same document it noted that Mastercard, Visa and Revolut had applied for judicial review of its proposal to cap the fees. Geradin Partners partner David Gallagher describes the cap as one that “has not yet been implemented but is still being considered.”

Who is included

The claim’s website defines the proposed class as UK-based businesses that accepted at least one online or other “card not present” payment from a Visa or Mastercard consumer credit or debit card issued in the EU, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein, at any time since October 2020. Business size and sector do not matter.

The claim is opt-out. Businesses that fit the definition are included automatically unless they choose to leave, and the claim’s FAQ says they do not need to do anything for now. Before the case can go further, the tribunal has to decide whether to let it proceed as a collective action with Pope as class representative.

Mastercard rejects the claim. A spokesperson told the Law Society Gazette: “We strongly disagree with the basis of this claim.”

What it means for merchants now

The claim is about money already paid. It does not change what a UK business pays on an EEA card payment today. Merchants on interchange-plus pricing can see the inter-regional fee as its own line on their statements. Merchants on a flat rate pay one blended percentage that already includes it. Our guide to interchange-plus vs flat-rate pricing explains how to read both kinds of statement, and the payment fee calculator compares the published standard rates of the main processors.