Two Regulators, Two Months, One Playbook: The UK and Australia on Visa and Mastercard Scheme Fees
Within two months of each other, the UK and Australia have published convergent regulatory approaches to Visa and Mastercard scheme fees. The specific tools differ. The convergence is the story.
The PSR opened consultation on regulatory financial reporting (RFR) requirements this week, with comments due July 3, 2026. The RBA's conclusions paper landed in March 2026. Between them, both regulators are now naming similar themes, even if the enforcement tools differ:
- Standardized data on scheme fee revenue, costs, and profitability
- Mandatory disclosure of fee schedules
- Documented justification for fee changes
- Simplification of fee structures
- Supervisory oversight of pricing decisions
The PSR was explicit about why: they cannot assess whether the schemes are profitable in the UK. RFR is designed to close that gap.
A few things worth tracking for issuers and acquirers in other markets.
The PSR and RBA aren't coordinating, but they're converging. That matters because every other major payments regulator now has a defensible template to point to.
The "we don't have enough visibility into profitability" framing is the most important sentence in either document. Once a regulator publicly names the information asymmetry, closing it becomes a forcing function for everything that comes after.
For US issuers and processors, even without direct domestic action, global schemes will be operating against fragmenting compliance regimes. Anyone with cross-border exposure should expect the data demands to compound.
