Ex-CMA director Ann Pope seeks EUR 800 million from Visa and Mastercard over EEA card fees

Work Ann Pope's EUR 800 million ^[1] backwards and you get a rough size for the spending at issue. The schemes raised the default fee by 0.95 percentage points on consumer debit and 1.2 points on consumer credit ^[15]. Suppose the damages were only that increase applied to card spend. The claim would then correspond to roughly EUR 84 billion of EEA debit spending at UK merchants, or about EUR 67 billion on credit ^[16]. The real card mix sits somewhere in between, and the source does not show how the claimant built the figure.

The class period is the odd term. It opens in October 2020 ^[4], 12 months before Visa raised its fee and 18 months before Mastercard followed ^[6][17]. The claim says the schemes overcharged UK businesses, including by exploiting the removal of the EU caps ^[13], so its theory of harm covers more than the two increases. That wider theory is also where the EUR 800 million is weakest. A tribunal that measured damages only from the increase dates would cut 12 to 18 months from the period ^[17].

I think the claim does more damage to fees already charged than to how the schemes set fees from here. A damages award compensates what merchants paid. Future fee levels depend on the PSR's proposed price cap, and the cap has not been implemented ^[10]. Until it is, Visa and Mastercard still set the default level ^[5]. The counter-case is that a second claim on top of the CAT's earlier unlawfulness ruling ^[9] puts pressure on pricing by itself, because every month the post-Brexit rates stay in place adds to what a tribunal could later award. If either scheme cuts its UK-EEA inter-regional fees before a cap is imposed, the litigation is moving prices and this view is wrong.