It is the third interchange claim now open in the UK. Each one covers a different line of what a merchant pays its acquirer.

What each claim covers

• Commercial and inter-regional cards, June 2016 to June 2022. Certified in September 2024, more than £4 billion. Commercial-card interchange was never capped by the Interchange Fee Regulation. On a statement it sits under its own card-product lines, at rates well above the consumer caps.

• EEA-issued cards used remotely at UK merchants, since October 2020. Filed on 8 October 2026 for about 126,000 businesses, more than £700 million. After Brexit the EU caps stopped applying to these transactions. Visa moved inter-regional card-not-present rates from 0.2% to 1.15% on debit and from 0.3% to 1.5% on credit in October 2021; Mastercard followed in April 2022. The Payment Systems Regulator put the extra cost at £150 to £200 million a year. On a statement these are the inter-regional lines of the interchange section.

• Consumer debit, credit and prepaid cards, since October 2020. The new claim. About one million businesses with revenue under £100 million would be included unless they opt out; larger ones would have to opt in. These are the capped lines, and for most merchants the bulk of interchange paid.

Why a capped fee can be challenged

The answer is in the Tribunal’s judgment of 27 June 2025 in the umbrella interchange proceedings. Default multilateral interchange fees restrict competition by object, whether or not a regulation caps them: a fee set collectively by the schemes remains a fee set collectively. The cap limits the amount. It does not change the mechanism.

Visa and Mastercard have said they will appeal. Two questions were left to later trials: how much of any overcharge merchants passed on to their customers, and whether an exemption applies. Those two answers, not the headline values, will decide what the three claims are worth.

Where this sits on a statement

A merchant billed on interchange++ receives interchange, scheme fees and the acquirer’s margin as separate lines, with interchange broken down by card product and issuer region. Each of the three claims corresponds to a subset of those interchange lines, and the statements since October 2020 are the record of what was paid.

A merchant on a blended rate receives one percentage. The acquirer holds the breakdown.

That is the operational point at this stage. Whether either new claim is authorised, and on what terms, is for the Tribunal.

Sources

The Guardian, 26 October 2026 · British Retail Consortium, 16 October 2026 · Competition Appeal Tribunal judgment of 27 June 2025, as reported by Global Legal Post · Harcus Parker, 4 September 2024

Contribute to the benchmark

We are building a European benchmark of the effective cost of acceptance: interchange, scheme fees and acquirer margin, by market and card type. Contributions are anonymised, the methodology is published, and the dataset is shared with contributors. Contribute to the benchmark (5 minutes).

If this reading of the UK claims is useful, subscribe: one research edition a month, and shorter notes when the evidence justifies them.On 26 October 2026, Harcus Parker and Hausfeld announced an application to the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal for an opt-out collective action against Visa and Mastercard, valued at up to £5 billion. It is the third UK interchange claim in two years, and the first aimed at consumer cards, whose fees have been capped since 2015. Nothing has been authorised yet.

In early October, we followed merchant sites in 28 European countries to their checkout page. We recorded the methods offered and their order, the shape of the journey, the shop’s platform, the processor when it’s available, the countries served, the currencies, and product prices.

Here is what that record shows:

Six methods at the median

The European checkout page has widened. The median is six methods displayed, more than two pages in three show at least five, and close to one in three shows eight or more. The narrow page, with two methods at most, now accounts for only one page in six.

More than half of checkout pages show five methods or more. Checkout pages reached, by number of payment methods displayed. OBSERVED.

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On sites where at least one method is visible, wallets — Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay — appear on 67% of them, PayPal on 57%, instalments on 45% and a local method — iDEAL, Bizum, Bancontact, Blik — on 27%. Since Apple Pay is displayed only in Safari, the wallet share is a floor. The card is still present almost everywhere, but it is no longer alone, nor always first.

Express first, one page

More than one site visited in four (27%) shows an express payment button before the address is even entered. PayPal is clearly the most frequent express button, ahead of Klarna, then Apple Pay, Google Pay, Shop Pay and Amazon Pay. These buttons fill in address and payment in one gesture, and steer the order towards the wallet or provider behind them.

The journey has also become shorter. Among checkout pages whose structure could be read, more than eight in ten fit on a single page. A mandatory account before paying now appears on only about one page in twenty-five: guest checkout has become the norm.

The platform chooses before the contract

The platform the shop runs on decides which methods are displayed by default. On Shopify, the in-house wallet, Shop Pay, appears almost everywhere, and instalments are about twice as frequent as on custom-built sites. Salesforce Commerce Cloud stands out for express payment in the cart, present on more than one site in two. Shopware and PrestaShop show PayPal on a majority of sites, but instalments much less often.

Merchant size follows the same logic: the smallest show six methods at the median, the largest four. Small merchants run on Shopify far more often; much of the width of their page comes from the platform.

Six markets, six profiles

The six best-represented countries in the sample do not pay the same way. The United Kingdom is the wallet market, with wallets on close to four pages in five and almost no local method. Italy is the instalments market, visible on six pages in ten. In the Netherlands, iDEAL structures the checkout page, present on more than two pages in three. Germany stands out for Klarna, Spain for Bizum, on close to one page in three.

There is no average European payment. Share of each country’s observable pages showing a wallet, instalments and the most visible local method. OBSERVED.

France shows the most internationally oriented profile: its sites offer, at the median, over 50% more delivery countries than the sample overall, while Dutch websites serve roughly one-third as many. On currencies, 7% of checkout pages belong to a site displaying more than three.

Sectors and prices

Fashion is the largest sector in the sample, with about one site in six. Along with sport, it is where wallets and instalments are most visible; food and electronics show them less often.

The price of the first product added to the cart serves as the reference price: €70 at the median across all sites, with the middle half of prices between €28 and €199, and a mean of €236, pulled up by a few expensive items. By sector, the median price runs from €30 in food and €42 in beauty to €89 in home, €94 in fashion, €110 in sport and €189 in electronics.

One contract, six rates: from 2.3% in food to 1.6% in electronics. Effective rate of a standard European card (1.5% + €0.25) at each sector’s median price: the displayed 1.5% and what the fixed fee adds. OBSERVED and CALCULATED.

These gaps matter: any tariff combining a percentage and a fixed fee weighs more heavily, in proportion, on low prices. On a standard European card at public pricing, the same contract costs 2.3% of the price to an online grocer whose median item is €30, and 1.6% to an electronics seller at €189: the fixed fee makes up more than a third of the fees for the first, less than a tenth for the second. With the same method, two merchants do not pay the same effective rate.

And what these journeys cost

Applied to the same reference price, public tariffs give very different costs depending on the journey. The standard European consumer card is the reference: 186 basis points, i.e. 1.86% of the price. A premium card costs 1.7 times that reference. PayPal, for a European buyer, 1.8 times. Instalments, at the displayed “from” rate, about three times. A PayPal payment from a non-European buyer with conversion, 4.5 times.

One price, seven ways to capture it. Acceptance cost in basis points, by journey, at French public tariffs re-read on 16 October 2026. CALCULATED.

This is not a ranking of providers; it is an anatomy of cost: negotiated rates move the levels, the mechanics remain. A six-method page, with an express button on top and buyers from several countries, produces a cost composed method by method and market by market.

What comes next

This record is valid for October 2026. Habits evolve, new payment methods appear, the economy shifts baskets, and a Polish checkout page has little in common with a French one. Six countries and six sectors do not describe Europe.

So we will carry on: more countries, more sectors, and the same crawl run again in a few months to see what has actually changed. If a figure looks wrong to you, if you know a source we have not seen or a market we should look at, write to us at the address in the footer.

Contribute to the benchmark

We are building the first European benchmark of effective acceptance cost by vertical, geography and ticket size, for publication in December. Contributions anonymised, methodology published in full alongside the results, dataset shared with contributors before release.

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Before you go

If this observation is useful, two things help it travel: subscribe to receive the next ones, and forward it to the person who signs your payment contracts. One figure surprised you, or one you would read differently? Say so in the comments: every observation is revised with its readers.

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Method: merchant sites crawled from early October 2026. Public tariffs of Stripe France, PayPal France (schedule of 15 July 2026), and Klarna via Stripe.

The Payment Economics · October 2026 · an initiative of the ORYJIN team · contribute@thepaymenteconomics.com

The Payment Economics is an observatory of the economics of payments: official data, original research and industry evidence on how the cost of accepting payments is changing. It is free. One research edition a month, and shorter notes when new evidence warrants them. Sources are public and cited, and every percentage names its base.

Who reads it

People who run payments in payment-heavy industries: heads of payments, CFOs, operations and fraud leads at merchants, marketplaces, travel, gaming and subscription businesses, and their counterparts at PSPs, acquirers and issuers who see the same shifts from the other side.

How an edition is built

The signal: what the data or the change shows, with its source and its limits. The reading: what it means for an operator, in plain terms. The takeaways: numbered, ready to put in front of a team. Short on time? Read the takeaways.

Edition 001 — What the latest ECB data changes for 2027 payment budgets

Terminals 20.7 M → 25.7 M in a year (+24.6 %), card payments +6.6 %. Card payment growth by count 11.3 % → 9.6 % → 7.9 % over three periods while the average ticket fell about 3 %. Six takeaways for 2027 close the edition. Read it here: https://www.thepaymenteconomics.com/p/what-the-latest-ecb-data-changes

Edition 002 — European checkout pages: what 9,000 journeys reveal

Merchant sites from twenty-eight European countries, followed to their checkout page in October 2026. Six methods on the median page; more than two pages in three show at least five. Where a method is visible: wallets on 67 %, PayPal 57 %, instalments 45 %, a local method 27 %. An express button before the address on more than one site in four. At public tariffs, the same price costs up to 4.5 times more to accept depending on the route taken. Read it here: https://www.thepaymenteconomics.com/p/european-checkout-pages-9000-journeys

Who writes it, and who could

Payments practitioners who own these questions in their day jobs. The Payment Economics is open to contributors: if you run payments, fraud or finance at an operator and have a dataset, a pattern or a reading worth sharing, write to contribute@thepaymenteconomics.com. Co-written pieces carry your name, or stay anonymous if you prefer.

The benchmark

We are building a European benchmark of effective acceptance cost by sector, geography and basket size, for publication in December. Contributions are anonymised, the method is published with the results, and contributors receive the dataset before release. Five minutes: tally.so/r/Y51KbW

Reply if you disagree with a reading. The best replies become the next edition’s questions.

The Payment Economics is published at the initiative of the ORYJIN team.

The ECB’s payment statistics are probably the most complete public picture of the European payment system. Its latest release, published in July 2026 and covering the second half of 2025, records 83.5 billion non-cash payments for a total value of €117.8 trillion.

Its value goes beyond a reading of volumes. Taken apart, compared over time and set against market trends, this data reveals shifts — sometimes gradual — that end up showing in a company’s operations and economics. That is the exercise we devote this first issue to.

1. Usage and the payment mix

In the second half of 2025, cards accounted for 57% of non-cash payments by count, ahead of credit transfers, direct debits and e-money. By value, the hierarchy inverts almost entirely.

That inversion is not a statistical curiosity. Count and value are two distinct cost bases: value carries ad valorem fees, liquidity, and exposure; count carries most of the per-event processing load and operational work. A model built on GMV alone therefore leaves one of its two drivers implicit.

Four movements emerge from the comparison with earlier releases.

Cards are still growing, but decelerating. 47.8 billion transactions, up 7.9% year on year. Growth remains strong, but it has slowed continuously for eighteen months: +11.3% in H2 2024, +9.6% in H1 2025, +7.9% in H2. Over the same period, credit transfer growth by count stayed between 6.5% and 7.7%.

The growth gap between the two instruments therefore moves from 4.0 points in H2 2024 to 0.8 points a year later. The decomposition matters as much as the result: cards lose 3.4 points of growth over the period, credit transfers 0.2 points. The gap closed because cards slowed, not because transfers accelerated. One half-year does not constitute a reversal, and the January 2027 release will be the first useful test.

The same release adds a usage indicator: within euro-area retail payment systems, instant credit transfers account for 25% of the number and 8% of the value of credit transfers processed. That is not a merchant-acceptance share, but it does establish that instant infrastructure already carries a material number of low-value transfers.

Contactless is no longer a technology being adopted: it is infrastructure. With 32.9 billion transactions (+11.9%), it now represents 85% of in-person card payments by count and 70% by value, against 79% and 62% in H1 2024. At that level, the remaining headroom is only fifteen points.

The terminal estate is growing four times faster than the transactions it processes. Point-of-sale terminals move from 20.7 to 25.7 million, or +24.6%, while in-person card payments grow by 6.6%: the average number of transactions per terminal therefore falls by about 14% year on year. This reading needs handling with care. The ECB notes that multi-acquiring can lead several providers to declare the same terminal, and the growth rate of the estate moves from +7.9% in H2 2024 to +24.0% in H1 2025. The data therefore does not allow real expansion of the estate to be distinguished from a counting effect.

Payment methods are stacking rather than substituting. Between 2024 and 2026, the share of merchants declaring they accept mobile payments moves from 36% to 68%, while card acceptance holds at 88% and cash acceptance rises from 90% to 92%. Set against the fact that 93% of the terminal estate is contactless-enabled, this increase probably reflects better awareness of what the existing terminal already does, more than the adoption of a new instrument.

These movements converge on a single observation: the European payment mix is not simplifying; it is thickening.

2. The trajectory of average tickets

Set against each other, count and value produce implied average tickets separated by two orders of magnitude.

Across each of the last four published half-years, the number of card payments grew faster than their value. The direction has been constant for two years. The amplitude, however, has been divided by three before stabilising around −0.9%.

The instinctive reading keeps the constancy and overlooks the deceleration. It should be the other way round. The profile is not that of a structural trend settling in, but that of a transition reaching its end — consistent with contactless already at 85% of in-person payments.

Contactless confirms that reading directly. Having moved small baskets from cash to card, its own ticket goes from −0.1% and −0.3% in 2024 to +1.0% and then +0.8% in 2025. The engine of compression has changed sign, confirming it over two consecutive half-years.

If the decline stops now, the one that has already happened is banked: between H1 2024 and H2 2025, the aggregate card ticket fell by roughly 3% cumulatively. That drift occurred with the contract unchanged. And yet, mechanically, it changed the cost of every euro collected.

3. The unit economics of a transaction

3.1 Why a falling average ticket is a financial subject

Acceptance costs are overwhelmingly managed as a percentage of GMV: 80 basis points, 120 basis points, 1.5% of processed volume. The convention is convenient, and it conceals a structural property of the cost stack.

Some costs vary with the value of the transaction. Others vary with its existence: scheme fees per authorisation and per clearing record, PSP per-transaction fees, gateway, 3DS, tokenisation. A third category — terminal rental, monthly minimums, subscriptions — is fixed per period and follows neither.

The consequence is immediate: when the average ticket falls, the basis-point weight of fixed costs rises, with the contract and the tariffs strictly unchanged. That is a mix effect, not a pricing effect, and the distinction determines who you should be asking.

3.2 The order of magnitude

Nine cents are worth 9 basis points on a €100 payment and 90 basis points on a €10 payment. The supplier has raised nothing, the contract is identical, and the unit economics bear no resemblance to one another. On €1 billion of annual volume, one basis point represents €100,000.

3.3 The counter-intuitive consequence

Applied to the euro-area aggregate, the drift is modest: roughly 3% cumulative over two years, which is less than one basis point on the model above. That should be said rather than inflating the effect.

If this deceleration marks the completion of the transition, the stakes move. It is no longer about forecasting the ticket, but about whether the company detects a drift that produces no signal — and whether it turns that into a renegotiation argument.

Since our last pricing agreement, our average ticket has fallen by several percent. Has anyone measured it, and has the contract been reopened?

In almost every case, the answer is no — because nothing produces the alert. The contractual rate has not moved. The invoice carries no new line. Only the effective cost has shifted, and nobody calculates it. This is a retrospective audit problem, not a forecasting problem.

Two qualifications. This mechanism only bites if your schedule includes per-transaction fees: on a purely blended rate, a falling ticket costs your acquirer, not you. And the euro-area aggregate blends every vertical, including high-ticket e-commerce that heavily dilutes the effect. It is a floor, not a forecast: a quick-service restaurant, a transport operator or a gaming operator taking repeated low-value deposits move several times faster, and from a far more sensitive point on the scale above.

3.4 Two costs the public data sees poorly

Acceptance cost itself. The only public European series comes from a study commissioned by the European Commission, which reports the net merchant service charge on debit cards rising from 0.27% in 2018 to 0.44% in 2022 — seventeen basis points. Its authors state that the sample is limited, that it covers twelve countries, and that the level cannot be extrapolated to the EU-27. It is a market signal, not a benchmark.

Fraud, which is a cost. The joint EBA–ECB report published on 15 December 2025 puts payment fraud in the EEA at €3.4bn in 2022, €3.5bn in 2023 and €4.2bn in 2024 — an increase of €602 million, or +17%, over the last year.

The aggregate rate, meanwhile, stays at around 0.002% of transaction value. But that rate divides fraud across all instruments by a total value that is 92% credit transfers: it is the rate of no single instrument.

Two details matter for a merchant. In absolute terms, the largest loss pool is not cards: €2.5bn on credit transfers, against €1.3bn on cards. By rate, the hierarchy inverts — 0.001% for credit transfers, 0.033% for cards, roughly thirty-three times higher. And for cards issued in the EU/EEA where the counterparty sits outside the EEA, where SCA is not required, the report measures a fraud rate about seventeen times higher by value. This is not a regulatory footnote: it is a cost differential tied to the geography of the flows and to where the acquiring is domiciled.

4. What 2026 already says, and what to build in for 2027

We should be precise here: the ECB’s payment statistics for the first half of 2026 are not published. At the observed cadence, they will appear in late January 2027. Any quantified claim about those flows today rests on something other than the half-yearly series — the February–April 2026 company survey, which measures declared acceptance and not flows; the Eurosystem payments strategy of March 2026; and the ECB’s quarterly card indicators, available on the Data Portal.

On that basis, six assumptions deserve to enter a 2027 budget exercise.

One — Do not extend the fall in the average ticket at the 2024 pace. The series indicates a stabilisation around −1% a year, not an acceleration. The prudent assumption is a near-stable ticket at aggregate level, and a trajectory of its own to be measured for low-value verticals. With inflation expected at 2.2% in 2027, a ticket stable in nominal terms falls by about two points in real terms.

Two — Audit the drift already absorbed before modelling the next one. The figure that matters is not the projection: it is the gap between your current average ticket and the one that prevailed at your last pricing negotiation. That is the only indicator that tells you whether a renegotiation is due.

Three — Budget on two drivers, not one. Payment Cost = α × Volume + β × Transactions, where α covers the components proportional to value and β the fixed per-transaction fees, before mix effects. A budget expressed as a percentage of GMV carries an error that grows every period as soon as count and value stop growing at the same pace.

Four — Separate price variance from mix variance in reporting. A higher effective rate does not prove a tariff increase. It can come from ticket, geography, card mix, channel, or instrument mix — and only then from price. Until the two are separated, the conversation with the supplier is badly framed.

Five — Treat instrument mix as the next cost driver. Mobile acceptance has doubled in two years without card or cash acceptance receding: the market is not substituting; it is stacking. Each instrument added brings its contract, its pricing schedule, its settlement cycle, its reconciliation format, its fraud profile, and its operational workload. The cost of an additional instrument is not its rate: it is its rate plus the complexity it adds to everything else. That workload appears on no invoice and sits entirely in your headcount.

Six — Adjust any annual comparison crossing 1 January 2026. Bulgaria adopted the euro on that date. Euro-area aggregates widen from H1 2026, and any 2026 growth figure quoted without a perimeter adjustment will blend organic growth with geographic extension.

What we still do not know

Europe measures its payment flows to a tenth of a point. It has no robust measure of total acceptance cost by vertical, geography and ticket size; of the genuinely fixed and genuinely ad valorem shares of the cost stack; of scheme-fee development since 2022; of the gap between contracted and realised cost; or of the full cost of a euro collected by wallet or by instant transfer, at equivalent ticket and fraud profile.

The model presented here describes a mechanism. It measures nothing, because the necessary data does not exist publicly.

Conclusion

The ECB does not measure acceptance cost. Its data nevertheless shows why that cost can drift without a supplier changing a single tariff: transaction count grows faster than value, fixed costs weigh more as the average ticket falls, and a broader mix adds complexity that a blended rate does not capture.

To prepare for 2027, the question can therefore no longer be only: how much volume will we process? It must become: how many transactions will we process, at what ticket, through which instrument, on which channel and in which geography? European aggregates cannot predict a merchant’s rate, nor support a conclusion of general cost inflation. They provide something else: a signal robust enough to stop managing payments through GMV alone. The finance work now consists of decomposing the variance before attributing it.

We are building the first European benchmark of effective acceptance cost by vertical, geography and ticket size, for publication in December. Contributions anonymised, methodology published in full alongside the results, dataset shared with contributors before release.

→ Contribute to the benchmark (5 minutes)

Sources

• European Central Bank — Semi-annual payment statistics: second half of 2025, 22 July 2026; first half of 2025, 29 January 2026; second half of 2024, 23 July 2025; first half of 2024, 30 January 2025.

• European Banking Authority and European Central Bank, 2025 Report on Payment Fraud, 15 December 2025. Data covering 2024.

• European Commission, Directorate-General for Competition, Study on new developments in card-based payment markets, including as regards relevant aspects of the application of the Interchange Fee Regulation, final report, 6 February 2024.

• European Central Bank, Use of cash by companies in the euro area in 2026, 13 August 2026; see also the ECB summary press release. Telephone survey conducted by Ipsos European Public Affairs between 23 February and 10 April 2026 among 8,205 companies across the 21 euro area countries and four business sectors.

• European Union, Regulation (EU) 2024/886 on instant credit transfers in euro, 13 March 2024; timeline and key obligations presented by the ECB in Instant Payments Regulation.

• European Central Bank, The ECB Survey of Professional Forecasters — Third quarter of 2026, 24 July 2026. Median inflation forecast: 2.2% in 2027.

Average ticket sizes and changes are calculated from published levels and rates, and are flagged as derived. Simulations are flagged as illustrative. Figures not verified against the primary source are explicitly flagged. No statistic is estimated or extrapolated.

The Payment Economics is an independent observatory of the economics of payments, established at the initiative of the ORYJIN team.