The Payment Systems Regulator’s consultation on a regulatory financial reporting remedy for Visa and Mastercard scheme fees closed on 3 July, the most concrete step this year in a market review whose two substantive remedies have quietly drifted off their original timetable. The reporting consultation — CP26/1, published on 21 May 2026 — is the visible marker. The transparency and pricing-governance directions that were meant to be the headline acts are not yet out.
That is worth stating plainly, because the regulator’s earlier framing pointed at a June finalisation. On its market-review page, the PSR now says it has consulted on the information, transparency and complexity (ITC) remedy and the pricing-governance remedy and “will publish the final directions later this year”. Later this year is not June. The substantive enforcement step has slipped, and the only thing that has actually landed on the original cadence is a consultation on a reporting obligation.
What the market review found
The findings the remedies enforce have not moved. The PSR’s MR22/1.10 final report, published in March 2025, concluded that Mastercard and Visa do not face effective competitive constraints in the UK, and that the structure of the card market gives them “must-take” status with acquirers and merchants alike. In the regulator’s own words, acquirers “can do little other than accept fee increases”.
The cost figure is the line that fixed the political weather around the review: the PSR found the two schemes had increased core scheme and processing fees to acquirers by at least 25% since 2017, costing UK businesses at least £170 million extra a year — without, in the regulator’s assessment, cost justification it could evidence. That market-structure finding, not any view about absolute fee levels, is what the remedies are built to address.
Four remedies, narrowing to three
The PSR set out four possible remedies after the final report. Two — ITC and pricing governance — were taken forward and consulted on in CP25/3 in December 2025, with responses closing in February. A third, regulatory financial reporting, is the subject of the consultation that has just closed. The fourth is not being pursued.
The ITC remedy would require the schemes to give acquirers minimum information on new and modified fees ahead of the point at which they take effect, pushing fee-change data into the contractual chain — schemes to acquirers to merchants — at a stage where it can still be challenged or planned around rather than absorbed after the fact. The pricing-governance remedy is the more structural of the two: it would require the schemes to apply a defined pricing-decision principle when setting UK fees, and to keep formal records of how that principle was applied. In substance, it asks the schemes to do, document and disclose the cost-and-justification work the PSR found absent.
Neither direction caps fees. That distinction is load-bearing. The PSR is reaching into how prices are set and disclosed, not what they are. Both are now “later this year” rather than this summer.
What the reporting remedy actually does
The remedy whose consultation closed on 3 July is narrower and less adversarial than the other two, which is partly why it has moved on schedule while they have not. CP26/1 proposes a direction and accompanying regulatory accounting guidelines that would require specified card schemes to report their UK financial performance to the regulator on a standing basis.
The point is supervisory visibility. A periodic market review tells you where fees sat at a moment in time; a reporting direction gives the regulator a recurring data feed on scheme profitability in the UK, so it can see whether anything changes after the transparency and governance obligations bite. It is the least eye-catching of the remedies and, arguably, the one with the longest half-life — because it is the instrument that lets a supervisor keep watching once the market review is closed and the case team has moved on.
Scheme fees, not interchange
A point worth keeping precise: MR22/1 is about scheme and processing fees — what Visa and Mastercard charge for running the network — not interchange, the fee acquirers pay issuers on each transaction. Interchange on UK card transactions is regulated separately, under the UK Interchange Fee Regulations 2015 retained in domestic law after the EU exit, and the PSR runs a distinct workstream on cross-border interchange. Conflating the two overstates what these directions reach.
The clock the PSR is working against
The timing frame that made the original story is still live, just rearranged. The Financial Services and Markets Bill 2026, introduced on 20 May 2026 as part of the Leeds Reforms package, contains the clause folding the PSR’s functions into the Financial Conduct Authority. The government’s position is that the legislation transfers PSR powers across while the regulator continues operating with its statutory powers intact until the transition completes.
The slippage matters in that light. The June framing had the substantive directions issued by a payments-specialist regulator with months to spare; the “later this year” framing pushes them closer to the point at which carriage of this market starts shifting to a generalist conduct authority. The reporting remedy is the clearest illustration — the data feed it creates is most useful to whichever body is running ongoing supervision in 2027 and beyond, which is increasingly likely to be the FCA rather than the PSR that designed it.
Whether that transfer of carriage changes outcomes for merchants and acquirers is a genuine question. The FCA has the broader toolkit; the PSR has the institutional memory on this specific market. A remedy designed inside one supervisor and enforced — or supervised — by another does not always read cleanly across the handover.
For firms with material card-acceptance costs, the immediate planning point is unchanged by the slippage: watch for the ITC and pricing-governance final directions when they land later this year, because the ITC notice windows reshape when fee-change discussions can happen, and the pricing-governance records create a documentary trail that may, in time, support commercial pushback or regulatory and competition-law challenge. The structural question — whether the UK card market is genuinely competitive — remains open. The PSR has now consulted on every remedy it intends to pursue; what it has not yet done is put the two with teeth into force.
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