UK Claim Seeks About £5 Billion in Compensation from Visa and Mastercard

Key Facts

Law firms Harcus Parker and Hausfeld have applied to the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal to pursue a collective action against Visa and Mastercard, in a claim valued at about £5 billion. The estimate is based on the number of businesses alleged to have overpaid fees between 2020 and 2026, according to sources close to the case cited by The Guardian. The claim says excessive fees have harmed businesses and curbed competition since October 2020. Filing the application does not mean the collective action has been authorized or that compensation has been determined; businesses’ ability to obtain compensation depends on the application succeeding. If it proceeds, the case would put the cost of accepting card payments and the practices of the two payment networks before the court.

The claim centers on multilateral interchange fees set by the two networks and paid by businesses through their banks when card transactions are processed. It alleges that weak competition allowed higher fees to be charged on debit, credit and prepaid card transactions. According to the report, if the application succeeds, about one million UK businesses, organizations and charities with revenue below £100 million would be included automatically, with the option to opt out. Businesses above that threshold would not be included automatically and would have to apply to join. Some larger companies’ claims could reach tens of millions over the claim period, the report said.

The move comes amid regulatory scrutiny of fee levels and competition in the UK payments market. A Payment Systems Regulator report said cross-border interchange fees on UK and European Economic Area card-not-present transactions, such as online sales, rose fivefold after Brexit. In a final report issued in December 2024, the regulator concluded that Visa and Mastercard had raised these fees to unjustifiably high levels, at the expense of UK businesses. It also found that competitive constraints on the acquiring side were ineffective, and that information provided to acquirers about fees was not clear and detailed enough. Those findings provide regulatory context for the new case but do not determine the compensation application before the court.

The two companies defended their fees. Mastercard said it "strongly disagrees with the basis of this claim," describing the action as "speculative" and linking it to a rise in litigation funded by third parties. The company added that interchange fees support the UK payments system. Visa said the fees are a critical part of maintaining a "secure digital payments ecosystem" that benefits consumers, merchants and banks. On funding, the report said the case is financed by London-based Bench Walk Advisors. Stephen Allen is leading the claim; according to the report, he has pursued collective actions against the companies since 2021.

The new action comes as other, older court proceedings address interchange fees between the networks. In June 2025, the Competition Appeal Tribunal issued a ruling after the first trial in those cases, finding that the fees breached competition rules, according to a summary published by Hausfeld. The companies’ application for permission to appeal that ruling remains pending. A third trial in the older cases will consider whether the fees qualify for a competition exemption linked to efficiency gains; no date had been listed when the summary was published. Those proceedings are separate from the new application filed by Harcus Parker and Hausfeld.

In UK trade data, the Office for National Statistics reported that non-food store sales volumes fell 0.4% in September. Online clothing retailers attributed weak sales of autumn and winter collections to warmer-than-usual weather. The figure relates to retail sales and does not identify the volume of payments made by card. In the market, Mastercard shares closed at $623.6 a share and Visa at $407.92 on 23 October 2026. The next item on the official calendar is the Bank of England’s September "Money and Credit" report, due on 29 October 2026; the case could take years to resolve, according to the report.