In this blog, Anthony Pygram, Senior Manager at the PSR, provides an update on our market review into cross-border interchange fees

Why we’re carrying out this market review

Every time people use Mastercard or Visa cards issued in the European Economic Area (EEA) for online retail transactions with UK businesses, UK businesses pay cross-border interchange fees. After Mastercard and Visa significantly raised some of these fees in 2021 and 2022, we launched a market review to understand the impact of these increases, whether they indicate that the market is not working well and if any action is needed from us.

What we’re doing

Since announcing our review, we’ve been gathering and evaluating evidence from a wide range of stakeholders. These include acquirers, merchants, and banks as well as Mastercard and Visa.

We published our interim report in December 2023, where we set out our provisional concerns that Mastercard and Visa have likely raised these fees to an unduly high level, at the expense of UK businesses. As such, our report proposed introducing a price cap to protect UK businesses from overpaying interchange fees in two stages:

  • An initial time-limited cap of 0.2% for UK-EEA consumer debit transactions and 0.3% for consumer credit transactions (where the transactions are made online1 at UK businesses)
  • A lasting cap on these interchange fees, once further analysis has been carried out to establish an appropriate cap level.

Our interim report consultation closed on 31 January. Since then, we’ve been hard at work carefully considering the responses we received, and how they might inform our thinking towards final recommendations.

Our final report will include our conclusions on whether the market is working well and whether or not we need to intervene (and if so how). Market reviews are complicated and detailed pieces of work, and to ensure we can take into account all stakeholder views we are now aiming to publish it in the second quarter of this year.

I’d like to close by thanking stakeholders who have engaged with the market review so far – if you would like any further information on the work we are doing, please get in touch at cardfees@psr.org.uk

Notes

  1. This includes online and other remote transactions