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Visa to be investigated over fees
19/10/2005 14:00:00
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is to undertake an in-depth inquiry into the fees credit card firm Visa charges retailers.
Visa and its members, which include most major banks, charge retailers for processing credit card transactions and the OFT suspects these may too high.
The cost of such charges is ultimately passed on to consumers in the prce they pay for goods.
Visa, which has 89 million cards in circulation in the UK, said it was "disappointed" at the OFT statement and said it had agreed the way it calculated its fee with the European Commission.
Mastercard was the subject of a similar investigation and in September the OFT found its so called interchange fee had been deliberately set too high.
The OFT said that the Visa charges restrict competition and infringe Article 81 of the EC Treaty and the Chapter I prohibition of the Competition Act.
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