Visa and Mastercard have plans to increase their credit card fees for merchants, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has reported.

The companies, which account for 99 per cent of all card transactions, are planning to increase interchange fees which are paid by a merchant to a cardholder's bank each time a credit card is used for a purchase, said the newspaper.

According to the people familiar with the matter and documents seen by the WSJ, the new fee increases – many of which will apply to e-commerce purchases – will come into force in October and April.

FStech has reached out to Visa and Mastercard for comment.

Last year, Visa and Mastercard both increased cross-border interchange fees for debit and credit card transactions.

Fees went up from 0.2 per cent to 0.3 per cent for debit cards and from 1.15 per cent to 1.5 per cent for credit cards.

At the time, the Payments Systems Regulatory (PSR) said it had not seen any evidence that the costs of operating payments services have increased for card issuers to warrant recent hikes to fees.

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