I note your warning that card handling fees are illegal. Please note that this is incorrect. Card handling fees within the EU are still perfectly permissible for business customers. They are also permissible for distant sales outside of the EU (where the customer’s bank is outside the EU). This is important as fees to the vendor may be as high as 4-5% for taking a foreign currency out-of-country corporate card payment (of which we get a number e.g. foreign government funded organisations where the administrative overhead would be large for other payment methods - the fee sometimes represents hundreds of pounds).
We manage this by not allowing card payments for B2C transactions within the EU. We do not use the card integrations within Quickfile as we don’t want customers to pay by card until they tell us they want to, at which point we can send them an invoice with the fee included and a payment link.
It was a disgraceful ruling that only benefited the card companies by forcing vendors to hide the card companies’ charges and forcing them to spread the charges across all customers regardless of whether they are paying by card or not. The ruling did nothing about unfounded booking fees or other last minute surcharges. It was more unfounded government meddling for the benefit of the banks.
QuickFile has no way of knowing whether or not a client is a business or an individual, so the notice covers all. We advise businesses use their own judgement, just as you have, in these cases.
It’s also worth noting that there are elements of B2B transactions where the surcharge isn’t permitted. For example:
Some aspects of the PSD2 surcharge ban also apply to B2B payments. The surcharge ban applies to EUR payments made by business customers using direct debit or credit transfer (but not payments made using a corporate credit or debit card), where the bank or card issuer of the business customer and payment provider of the merchant (i.e., Stripe) are both located in the EEA.
The best approach here is to apply the charge manually, as you have, to avoid any errors. If in doubt, I recommend checking with your local trading standards, or payment processor.
Thank you for your quick reply. My point is that your notice is incorrect information and if it is up to businesses to use their own judgement then don’t put a notice at all or, better, make the notice more accurate. It’s the kind of misleading inaccuracy one finds all over the HMRC website (no insult intended). Rather than saying card charges are illegal, a simple improvement could be, ‘card surcharges are prohibited for consumer purchases within the EU.’ (Interesting note from Stripe if EUR does not include GBP.)