The Financial Times reports that Mastercard will raise fees to more than five times the current amount for British shoppers using a card to buy from EU-based companies, providing a timely reminder of the power card providers wield over customers reliant on them for payments.
Both Mastercard and Visa add an ‘interchange fee’ to every credit or debit card payment using their networks, and in 2015 the European Union introduced a cap on these fees in response to concerns that ‘hidden expenses’ for companies and consumers were reaching hundreds of millions of euros.
Post-Brexit, Mastercard has informed merchants this cap will no longer apply to certain transactions because payments between Britain and the European Economic Area are now technically ‘inter-regional.’ As a result, from 15 October 2021, Mastercard will charge 1.5 percent of each transaction’s value for every online credit card payment from the UK to the EU. This is a 500 percent rise over the present 0.3 percent charge. Debit card payments will increase from 0.2 percent to 1.15 percent.
