By the time PayWave's disclosures were amended in February 2025, mass arbitration was an established procedure with a decade of precedent behind it. The PayWave demands nonetheless differ from most of what preceded them, in three respects worth setting out.
The loss is arithmetic, not narrative
In most consumer arbitration programs each claimant must describe what they were told and what they understood. Here the claim is a subtraction. PayWave published a rate; PayWave charged a different rate; the difference is the loss. Both numbers come from PayWave's own records.
That makes the demands unusually uniform on liability and unusually precise on quantum. It also means a claimant with no documents at all still has a claim — the transaction history exists on the respondent's servers whether or not the claimant kept a copy.
We are not challenging the clause
Many programs open with an attack on the arbitration agreement — unconscionability, defective notice, failure of consideration. We have not brought one. The November 2021 amendment is, in our assessment, likely to be enforceable, and a challenge would take two years to fail.
The clause is the claimants' best asset. Setting it aside would return 41,200 people to a court that cannot economically hear them.
Enforced as drafted, the clause requires PayWave to arbitrate every demand individually and to fund the forum for each one. That is a better position than a certified class would be in.
The remedy sought is partly prospective
The demands seek the fee difference and interest, which is ordinary. They also seek a form of disclosure relief: a binding statement of how fees are presented at the point of transaction rather than in a schedule a customer must go looking for.
Arbitrators are cautious about prospective relief, and it may not survive. We have pleaded it because the alternative — recovering the difference and leaving the disclosure untouched — treats the symptom.
This article is general information about procedure and is not legal advice on any individual claim. Attorney advertising. All case references, figures and names are fictional sample content prepared for this demonstration.
