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.

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.

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