A collective proceedings claim worth more than £700 million has been filed against Visa and Mastercard at the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal, alleging the two card networks exploited the removal of EU interchange caps following Brexit to levy unlawful inter-regional fees on UK businesses accepting online payments from European Economic Area customers.
The claim is brought by Ann Pope, a former Senior Director for Antitrust at the Competition and Markets Authority, acting through her vehicle Ann Pope Collective Proceedings Limited and represented by pan-European competition law firm Geradin Partners. The proposed class covers approximately 126,000 UK businesses that accepted remote payments from EEA-issued cards at any point since October 2020. Inclusion in the action is opt-out rather than opt-in, meaning businesses are automatically enrolled unless they choose to withdraw.
The fee increase at the centre of the claim
Before the end of the Brexit transition period, inter-regional interchange fees were subject to EU caps. After those caps ceased to apply to UK businesses, the Payment Systems Regulator found that Visa raised its UK-EEA online transaction fee five-fold in October 2021, moving from 0.2% to 1.15% for consumer debit cards and from 0.3% to 1.5% for consumer credit cards. Mastercard followed in April 2022 with equivalent increases.
The claim argues this was not a legitimate commercial response to changed market conditions. The UK remained part of the Single Euro Payments Area after Brexit, meaning the underlying cost structure of processing EEA-issued card transactions did not change materially. The PSR has itself concluded that Visa and Mastercard faced no effective competitive constraints on the acquiring side of their networks when setting these fees, and has proposed a price cap that remains under active consideration but has not yet been implemented.
Geradin Partners partner David Gallagher noted that the CAT had already found inter-regional interchange fee arrangements to restrict competition in a separate case. “Visa and Mastercard have great power over the payments that businesses rely on every day,” he said. “Our claims seek redress for UK businesses who, we say, have suffered harm as a result of Visa and Mastercard’s conduct.”
Market and regulatory context
The scale of potential liability reflects the economic weight of UK-EU trade. The claim cites 2025 figures showing UK exports to the EU at £384 billion, representing 41% of all UK exports. For any business selling goods or services to European consumers online, EEA-issued cards are effectively unavoidable: the PSR found Visa and Mastercard together handle nine in ten online transactions at UK businesses where the customer holds an EEA card.
The case lands at an active moment for interchange regulation in the UK. The PSR’s ongoing review of cross-border interchange, combined with the CAT’s prior findings on inter-regional fees, gives the claim a relatively firm regulatory foundation compared with many collective proceedings actions. That said, the quantum of £700 million-plus represents estimated accumulated overcharges across a broad class over several years, and final compensation, if awarded, would depend on the CAT’s assessment of the counterfactual fee level and the individual damages attributable to class members.
The action also sits within a broader European pattern. Several large-scale merchant interchange claims have proceeded before the CAT and in other EU jurisdictions over the past decade, typically on the back of prior competition authority findings. The Pope claim is notable for being filed after a domestic regulator, rather than the European Commission, identified the specific post-Brexit fee increase as problematic. That sequence may strengthen the claim’s prospects at the certification stage, though Visa and Mastercard are expected to contest both liability and the class definition.
Affected UK businesses can register interest at eeacardclaim.co.uk.
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