Consumers who made purchases from businesses selling in the UK between 1992 and 2008 could be affected by a collective consumer claim against Mastercard.

This website has been created to provide information about a collective consumer claim against Mastercard that has been filed with the Competition Appeal Tribunal (the “Tribunal”) by Walter Merricks CBE (the class representative) on behalf of a “class” of individuals.

The claim follows a legal finding of the European Commission that Mastercard imposed unlawful fees on transactions processed through its network. These fees were paid by businesses for accepting payments made with a Mastercard credit or debit card in the period 1992 to 2008. More than half a million businesses in the UK, including major supermarkets, that accepted Mastercard cards in the relevant period, paid these unlawful fees, and it is alleged passed these on to consumers in higher retail prices.

The claim says that if between 22 May 1992 and 21 June 2008 you purchased goods and/or services from businesses selling in the UK that accepted Mastercard cards, at a time at which you were both (1) a resident in the UK for a continuous period of at least three months, and (2) aged 16 years or over, you paid higher prices as a result of Mastercard’s unlawful conduct – irrespective of the means of payment you used. The claim has been brought on behalf of the class of individuals who meet these conditions except people who work for Mastercard or lawyers or judges in the case. If you meet these conditions, the claim also says that you paid higher prices until 21 June 2008, and possibly for two years thereafter, until 21 June 2010, during what is known as a “run-off period”, and so the claim also seeks to recover losses during the run-off period.

Although Mr Merricks filed his claim in 2016, it was disallowed by the Tribunal, so he appealed to the Court of Appeal which overturned the Tribunal’s decision. Mastercard appealed against that decision to the Supreme Court which upheld Mr Merricks’ claim in December 2020. The case was remitted to the Tribunal for redetermination, and a hearing took place on 25-26 March 2021 to consider whether the claim should be allowed to proceed. Judgment following that hearing was handed down on 18 August 2021, with the Tribunal finding that Mr Merricks’ claim was both eligible and suitable to be certified as a collective proceeding, the first of its kind in UK legal history. A case management hearing took place in January 2022 and in a judgment handed down on 9 March 2022, the Tribunal confirmed that class members who have died since the claim was filed on 6 September 2016, and those who die before the action is concluded, will be succeeded in the proceedings by the personal/authorised representative of their estate. Mastercard appealed the 9 March 2022 judgment to the Court of Appeal, which dismissed the appeal on 29 November 2022. While that appeal was ongoing the case continued to progress, and a further case management hearing took place in September 2022 to determine the next steps in the case, including a timetable for trial of a number of keys issues in dispute.

The Tribunal is currently considering whether some of the issues in Mr Merricks’s claim should be tried in joint hearings alongside similar issues in claims that have been brought by hundreds of merchants and other businesses against Mastercard (and Visa) relating to similar (and in some cases the same) interchange fees. The issues in question are: (a) whether, and to what level, banks passed on the costs of the unlawful fees to merchants and other businesses; and (b) whether, and to what level, merchants and other businesses passed these costs on to consumers.