New focus in UK Credit card investigation
The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) has today set aside the Office of Fair Trading's (OFT's) decision of September 2005 finding that MasterCard's interchange fees infringe European and UK competition law.
The OFT decision found that the collective agreement between members of MasterCard, including most major banks, setting MasterCard's historic interchange fees restricted competition. Interchange fees are the payments made between banks on purchases made using Visa and MasterCard cards.
MasterCard UK appealed the OFT's decision to the CAT and Visa Europe and the British Retail Consortium also intervened in that appeal. The CAT set aside the decision due to serious procedural problems.
The OFT announced that it will now focus its resources on investigating Visa and MasterCard's current interchange fee arrangements.
Frontier (London) advises Visa Europe.
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