Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm Anna Rago, Mlex's managing editor in London.

Today we'll be talking about a longstanding dispute between card payment operators,

MasterCard and Visa, with retailers in the UK over interchange fees.

These are the fees that businesses face for processing payments levied each time a customer

uses a credit or a debit card to buy goods in a shop.

While the fees in themselves are worth a fraction of a percentage point, the volume of transactions

means Visa and MasterCard are facing hundreds of millions of pounds in damages claims from retailers who claim the fees they've been charged for years are anti-competitive.

On the 4th of July, the UK Court of Appeal handed a victory to retailers like Jay Sainsbury's and W.N. Morrison's

by ruling that fees were indeed unlawful and restricted competition.

With me is our UK senior correspondent, Simon Zakaria, to talk about the latest ruling and what lies ahead for the companies.

Hello, Simon.

Hi, Anna.

Simon, this case has been going on for a long time.

Why is the latest ruling so significant?

Interchange litigation is nothing new for a MasterCard and Visa.

The interchange fee is a payment between a cardholders bank and a retailers bank.

But this one involved some of the UK's best known retailers,

so Sainsbury's, Asda, Morrison and Argos.

And it goes back a few years.

So the Court of Appeal was tasked for sorting out a jumble of different rulings from courts and judges

over the legality of these fees, which are highly contentious. And it got to the point where the Court of

Appeal just said, we have to kind of unify these different rulings and present a singular approach.

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