Visa and Mastercard face a EUR 800 million UK class action over post-Brexit interchange on EEA cards

Ann Pope, a former Senior Director at the UK Competition and Markets Authority, filed a proposed opt-out collective action at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on 9 October 2026 seeking approximately EUR 800 million in damages from Visa and Mastercard. The class covers roughly 126,000 UK-based businesses that accepted online payments from EEA-issued cards at any point since October 2020, and they are included automatically unless they opt out.

The claim is that both schemes overcharged merchants on inter-regional interchange for remote card payments once the EU caps no longer applied after Brexit. The Payment Systems Regulator had found that Visa raised UK-EEA online transaction fees five-fold in October 2021 and Mastercard followed in April 2022, taking consumer debit from 0.2 percent to 1.15 percent and consumer credit from 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent, and concluded the schemes faced no effective competitive constraint on the acquiring side when they did so. The claimant is represented by Geradin Partners.

This is the private-damages half of a fee increase the regulator already documented and has so far not capped: the PSR's proposed price cap on inter-regional fees remains unimplemented, and the CAT has separately already found inter-regional fees charged by both schemes unlawful. An opt-out class puts 126,000 merchants behind a single claim without any of them having to act, which converts a regulatory finding that moved no money into a cash exposure for both schemes.

For anyone modelling cross-border acceptance cost, the numbers in the PSR finding are the reference points: a five-fold step on the exact card-present-absent corridor that carries UK-EU trade, which the filing puts at roughly EUR 440 billion of UK exports in 2025.

Whether the CAT certifies the class, and whether certification revives the PSR's shelved cap on inter-regional interchange or lets the litigation substitute for it.

• thepaypers.com
• Payment Systems Regulator