Visa and Mastercard face £700m UK claim over post-Brexit fees

A proposed collective action filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal alleges that Visa and Mastercard overcharged around 126,000 UK businesses after Brexit left a gap in interchange-fee regulation, and seeks approximately £700m or more in compensation. The claim, announced on 8 October 2026 by the proposed class representative, Ann Pope Collective Proceedings Limited, concerns fees charged when UK businesses accepted online or other remote payments from customers using consumer Visa or Mastercard cards issued in the European Economic Area (EEA).

The case matters to UK-based businesses that have accepted remote payments made with EEA-issued consumer Visa or Mastercard cards since October 2020, because the claim is framed as an opt-out action: if the Tribunal eventually certifies it on that basis, eligible businesses would be included automatically unless they chose to leave, subject to the final class definition the Tribunal approves. No such certification has happened yet, and nothing in the claim entitles a business to compensation at this stage.

This is an allegation, not a finding against Visa or Mastercard. The Tribunal has not ruled on liability, has not approved the proposed class, and has not awarded any sum. The figures below come from the claimant's announcement and from a 2024 Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) market review that examined the same fee increases, but the PSR's findings and the claimant's damages case are legally distinct.

What the claim covers

Ann Pope Collective Proceedings Limited says the proposed class consists of UK-based businesses that accepted online or other remote payments using EEA-issued consumer Visa or Mastercard cards at any point since October 2020. The claimant's own estimate puts that class at roughly 126,000 businesses, though this figure, and the exact eligibility criteria, have not been tested or approved by the Tribunal. It is not yet clear from the public announcement whether card-present transactions, commercial cards, refunds or payments routed through intermediaries are included, nor why the proposed period begins in October 2020, before the Brexit transition ended and before the fee increases the claim relies on.

An interchange fee is a charge paid by a merchant's acquiring payment provider to the card issuer each time a customer pays by card. Visa and Mastercard set default interchange-fee levels for transactions on their networks, but it is card issuers, not the schemes themselves, that ordinarily receive the fee.

How the fees changed after Brexit

Before the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, consumer card payments between the UK and the EEA were capped under the EU Interchange Fee Regulation. Those caps limited relevant interchange fees to 0.2% of transaction value for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards.

From 1 January 2021, an onshored version of the UK's own interchange-fee regulation took effect, but its territorial scope did not extend the caps to UK-EEA transactions, so those payments fell outside both the EU cap and the onshored UK cap, according to HM Treasury's exit-related explanatory material and the PSR. Visa and Mastercard subsequently raised the relevant card-not-present rates. Parliament's Treasury Committee recorded in August 2022 that both schemes had increased fees in October 2021; the claimant's announcement, citing the PSR, instead says Mastercard's increase followed in April 2022. The two accounts of scheme-specific timing do not agree, and the point has not been resolved in the material available.

The PSR's market review found the post-Brexit card-not-present rates to be 1.15% for consumer debit cards and 1.5% for consumer credit cards:

The claimant describes both increases as "five-fold". That is accurate for credit cards, where the rate rose to exactly five times its former level. The debit-card rise, from 0.2% to 1.15%, is 5.75 times the earlier rate, so "five-fold" understates it slightly as a shorthand for the full picture.

The claimant's case

Ann Pope Collective Proceedings Limited alleges that Visa and Mastercard breached competition law by setting these fees at an excessive level once UK-EEA transactions lost the protection of the interchange caps. The claimant has also argued that the UK's continued participation in the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) meant the underlying cost of processing these transactions stayed broadly the same, implying the fee rise was not cost-justified. That argument has not been independently verified in the material reviewed for this article, and SEPA's scope is principally euro credit transfers and direct debits rather than card interchange pricing, so continued UK membership of SEPA does not by itself establish that card-processing costs were unaffected.

The claimant's roughly £700m figure is its own damages estimate. No breakdown of how it was calculated, how any damages would be split between Visa and Mastercard, or how individual businesses' losses would be assessed has been published alongside the announcement.

What regulators found, and what they did not decide

The PSR's final market review, published on 13 December 2024, found that Visa and Mastercard were not subject to effective competitive constraints when they set the relevant cross-border fees, that the increases reached an unduly high level, and that it identified no justification for them. The PSR separately estimated that the fee rises cost UK businesses an additional £150m to £200m a year.

These are regulatory findings from a market review, not a court or Tribunal ruling that Visa or Mastercard broke the law, and they do not establish that any individual business suffered a specific loss or that £700m is an accurate measure of total harm. The PSR's annual cost estimate provides context for the scale of the claimant's demand, but the two figures are not directly comparable: one is a regulator's yearly estimate across the market, the other is a claimant's cumulative damages claim for a defined class and period.

Separately, the PSR said on 10 October 2025 that it would not proceed with an interim price cap on these fees while litigation over its price-capping powers continued, and that it would instead work towards a methodology for a longer-term cap. No completed longer-term cap had been identified as of 12 October 2026.

Visa and Mastercard's position

Visa and Mastercard told the Treasury Committee in August 2022 that higher cross-border interchange fees reflected greater fraud risk on cross-border transactions and the costs issuers incur to prevent and detect that fraud. They also told the Committee that the schemes do not receive the interchange revenue directly, since it is paid to card issuers. The PSR's 2024 review reached a different conclusion, finding no justification for the increases and no evidence that the schemes had carried out specific assessments before raising the rates.

No response from Visa or Mastercard specific to the 2026 Ann Pope claim has been identified. Their 2022 submissions to Parliament address the same fee increases but were made before this litigation existed, so they should not be read as the schemes' pleaded defence to it.

What happens next at the Tribunal

Filing a claim is not the same as starting a certified case. Under section 47B of the Competition Act 1998 and the Competition Appeal Tribunal Rules 2015, the Tribunal must first hold a case-management conference and then decide whether to make a collective proceedings order. That decision covers whether Ann Pope Collective Proceedings Limited is a suitable class representative, whether the claims are eligible for collective treatment, and whether the action should proceed on an opt-in or opt-out basis. Visa and Mastercard can oppose certification, and may apply to strike out or seek summary judgment on some or all of the claims at that stage.

If the Tribunal does make an opt-out collective proceedings order, it will set the final class definition, the relevant dates, and the procedure and deadline for UK-domiciled businesses to opt out, with non-UK-domiciled businesses required to opt in instead. None of that has happened yet, so no business is currently bound into the case, and none is currently entitled to any payment.

What to watch next

No hearing date, case number or Tribunal decision in this specific claim had been located as of 12 October 2026. Businesses that accept remote payments from EEA-issued cards, and anyone advising them, can follow the case through the Competition Appeal Tribunal's own case register for the collective proceedings order application, and through the PSR's market-review page for any update on a longer-term interchange-fee cap. Nothing in the claim or in the PSR's findings currently guarantees compensation, and the claim could be narrowed, amended or refused certification before it proceeds any further.