Legal challenge has reached the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal as travel agency Trailfinders Limited and associated British companies have filed a damages claim against payment giants Visa and Mastercard. The claim, formally registered in May 2026, alleges that both payment networks enforced unlawful rules and fee structures that artificially inflated the cost of processing commercial card transactions.
At the heart of the lawsuit are multilateral interchange fees—the default fees paid by a merchant’s payment processing bank to the cardholder’s bank during a transaction. The claimants argue that these charges act as an artificial floor price, inflating the merchant service charges that businesses must pay to accept Visa and Mastercard commercial cards.
Furthermore, the legal action targets cross-border acquiring rules imposed by both payment schemes. The claimants assert that these rules restricted competition by preventing merchants from using lower-cost payment processors based in other European countries, effectively partitioning national markets and keeping domestic fees unnaturally high.
According to the filings, these practices violate both UK and European Union competition laws by restricting fair market competition. Trailfinders contends that without these mandated default fees, acquiring banks would not have charged interchange fees, and those savings would have been passed along to merchants. Because these practices are allegedly ongoing, the UK companies are seeking compensation for inflated fees paid since May 2020, alongside compound interest and legal costs.
The case treats the various corporate entities of Visa and Mastercard as unified economic entities responsible for setting and enforcing these network rules. The court notice clarifies that the formal filing marks the beginning of legal proceedings, with the tribunal set to determine whether the fee structures breached competition laws and caused measurable financial loss to the claimants.