Update: On 3 November 2021 we published our final report.

This annex describes the analysis we carried out to examine how average scheme fees as a percentage of GBP transacted, paid by acquirers to Mastercard and Visa, changed during the period 2014 to 2018. As explained below and in Chapter 5 of the interim report, we provisionally find that scheme fees rose significantly.

We examine whether the increases in scheme fees that we observe are due to increases in the total volume or total value of transactions, changes in transactions mix, or because of increases in fee levels. In this annex, we explain how we use econometric techniques to control for the effect of transaction volume, value and mix, to isolate any change in scheme fees that represents a price change.

This annex is structured as follows:

  • details of our methodology
  • description of the data we collected and summary of explanations Mastercard and Visa gave for recent trends in their fees
  • presentation of the descriptive statistics
  • presentation of the econometric analysis
  • summary of results
  • additional tables of results for reference

This document should be read alongside:

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