Delivery Hero Wins $43.6 Million UK Lawsuit Against Mastercard

German food delivery company Delivery Hero has been awarded $43.6 million from Mastercard in a victory in the United Kingdom courts.

The online food delivery company took legal action in December after a payment processing deal with Mastercard went south last year, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (July 19).

Mastercard did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

The payment-processing deal had been signed between Mastercard and Delivery Hero in October 2021 to encourage more people to use Mastercard’s payment service on Hero’s delivery platform, according to the Bloomberg report.

Mastercard ended the agreement with the accusation that Delivery Hero had not met certain conditions, the report said.

The U.K. court ruling in favor of Delivery Hero resulted in Mastercard being ordered to pay the original sign-on bonus of $40 million and an additional interest of $3.58 million, per the report.

This news comes two days after it was reported that Mastercard and Visa are facing an antitrust lawsuit filed by Block, which accuses them of conspiring to inflate fees and increase retail prices paid.

The antitrust lawsuit filed Friday (July 14) with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York stems from the Square payment platform’s alleging of inflated interchange fees, also known as “swipe fees,” charged by Mastercard and Visa with their member banks when a customer uses a credit or debit card, Bloomberg reported Monday (July 17).

About a month earlier, on June 8, four proposed lawsuits against Mastercard and Visa in the United Kingdom were halted by the country’s Competition Appeal Tribunal.

The tribunal ruled that the lawsuits proposed by Commercial and Interregional Card Claims (CICC) cannot proceed now but that the lawyers can provide revised proposals.

CICC is a special purpose vehicle that brought the lawsuits last year alleging that merchants were overcharged by the payments processors in the form of multilateral interchange fees, Reuters reported at the time.

Delivery Hero reported on April 27 that it has been making steady progress toward its profitability goals and that its profitability target is now “firmly in sight.” The local delivery platform said it had achieved revenue growth of 12% year over year despite a challenging comparison period.