Scheme fees: the UK regulator forces Visa and Mastercard to disclose, the EU is still examining

What happened

The British supervisory authority Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) found in its market review that Visa and Mastercard have raised their core scheme and processing fees charged to acquirers by at least 25 per cent since 2017, which costs businesses at least 170 million pounds a year in addition. Pricing, it says, is opaque and competition ineffective. As a remedy, the authority is now demanding auditable records for every new pricing decision as well as a regulatory financial reporting framework; the consultation on this ran into the spring of 2026. The EU Commission had sent questionnaires to merchants and payment service providers in September 2024 to examine the effect of scheme fees. A decision is still pending; in the event of an infringement, fines of up to ten per cent of worldwide annual turnover are possible.

Who it affects

Every merchant that accepts Visa or Mastercard, so practically all of them. The scheme fee is contained in every card fee, whether it is itemised or not.

Assessment

The card fee consists of three parts. Interchange goes to the customer’s bank and has been capped in the EU since 2015, at 0.2 per cent for debit and 0.3 per cent for credit cards. The margin of the acquirer or payment network operator is negotiable. And the scheme fee goes to Visa and Mastercard, is neither capped nor negotiable, and is almost never quantified. The British figures show what happens when a price does not have to be justified to anyone.

In Germany the merchant sees none of this, because they usually get a flat rate. The scheme fee increases of recent years have disappeared into those flat rates, and the merchant does not know whether their provider passed them on or raised their own margin. That is the real reason why I insist on an itemised statement.

What to do now

Demand a statement on an Interchange++ basis, in which interchange, scheme fee and margin are shown separately. The right to unbundling has applied since 2015.
When the provider raises prices, ask for the reason: scheme fee or margin?
Know your card mix: commercial and non-EEA cards fall outside the cap and are considerably more expensive.