Global Class Actions

The 2024 legal landscape in Germany marks a shift with the introduction of actions for investor claims related to crypto assets under the MiCA Regulation. This expansion allows for claims concerning misleading or omitted information in crypto whitepapers, broadening the scope of financial market litigation.

Efforts to streamline legal procedures are evident, with measures such as shortened deadlines and an enhanced role for the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) in Capital Markets Model Case Proceedings. This court now has greater autonomy in determining the objectives of class action proceedings, potentially leading to more efficient case management.

A notable procedural change is the shift to an opt-in mechanism for suspending related proceedings, replacing the previous automatic suspension. This will enable a large number of parallel individual actions with double evidentiary hearings in all instances, which will massively increase the requirements for the orderly handling of mass proceedings and require robust legal strategies and possibly increased legal resources. In addition, the disclosure obligations will be tightened in line with “pre-trial discovery” in such matters.  

Finally, the relationship between class actions by consumer associations and in Capital Markets Model Case Proceedings has been clarified. These types of actions do not exclude each other when relating to the same subject matter.

Looking ahead, the digital transformation of legal processes will require companies to adapt to electronic documentation and communication. The use of electronic process tools and sharing with clients will be required to handle the complex proceedings. Investing in digital infrastructure and training for document disclosure will be essential for compliance and efficiency. Revisiting data management and confidentiality protocols will be vital to protect sensitive information.

At some point in 2025 or beyond we may see cases with an aggregate of Capital Market Model Case proceedings and consumer class action.

Since financial institutions have been in the focus of consumer class actions in Germany since their first implementation in 2018, we expect that consumer associations will continue to make use of the existing option to bring motions for declaratory judgments on consumer law infringements but will also make use of the now available option to bring motions for redress on behalf of consumers. Various cases were brought against banks regarding terms and conditions concerning interest rates, before the direct motion for redress was available to the plaintiffs.

Following a record year in 2024, Italy's financial sector class action activity has experienced a decline in 2025. While comprehensive year-end data remains pending, initial statistics reveal a substantial reduction in new proceedings. Financial sector matters, however, comprise 50% of all 2025 filings.

In 2025, only European framework representative actions were filed, with no domestic class actions.

Consumer associations continue as the predominant initiators of collective litigation.

Primary Areas of Focus

Representative Actions Target:

• Consumer Credit Practices: Multiple actions addressing financial institutions' failure to reimburse/reduce upfront costs upon early loan repayment, seeking both injunctive relief and monetary compensation
• Unfair Commercial Practices: Consumer association brought claims against banking institutions, challenging specific contractual clauses (ABI clauses) and seeking clause annulment

Notable Filing Gap: No domestic class actions (seeking damages or injunctive relief) were initiated against financial sector entities in 2025.

Current Case Disposition: One case has achieved settlement, another has been terminated (likely through settlement per Ministry of Justice records), while the remaining 2025 cases await merit determinations. Significant developments in pre-2025 cases include: one representative action on upfront costs declared inadmissible, an inadmissibility ruling against a digital payment institution for alleged false advertising, and an appellate rejection of the malfunction case against a Fintech platform.

Projected Industry Trajectories:

Consumer association activism increasingly concentrates on financial institutions regarding unfair contractual terms and deceptive commercial practices, with specific emphasis on surety guarantees and consumer credit-associated costs.

Expanding Liability Landscape:

While collective redress campaigns currently target traditional banking and payment services, broader financial and insurance sectors face emerging exposure risks:

Securities Class Actions: Representing the next litigation frontier, potentially including corporate director involvement as evidenced by pending actions.

Technology-Driven Claims:

• Cybersecurity Incidents: Anticipated increase in data breach and platform outage damage claims (existing precedent in the financial sector)
• AI/Tech-Washing: Potential litigation concerning misrepresentation of artificial intelligence and technology capabilities in financial services

Emerging Risk Categories:

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG): Despite current limited Italian adoption, ESG-related class actions have emerged across other sectors and may extend to financial services, particularly following significant market disruptions.

Employment-Related Actions: While labor litigation traditionally lacks the homogeneity required for collective mechanisms, evolving precedent suggests potential financial sector exposure.

Strategic Corporate Preparation Framework:

1. Comprehensive Regulatory Compliance Monitoring: Implement robust oversight systems ensuring adherence to investor protection, data privacy, and sector-specific regulations across all operational areas with collective litigation potential.
2. Systematic Market Intelligence: Recent experience demonstrates methodical targeting patterns among representative bodies, who systematically identify market vulnerabilities and pursue sequential institutional actions. Maintaining sophisticated monitoring capabilities – preferably through specialized external counsel – enables proactive litigation management and early intervention strategies.
3. Pre-Litigation Resolution Optimization: Mandatory or customary pre-filing dialogue requirements (particularly for representative actions) create strategic settlement opportunities. Comprehensive cost-benefit analysis frequently facilitates dispute prevention or amicable resolution, avoiding substantial collective proceeding expenses, including claims exposure, legal fees, court costs, mandatory national newspaper judgment publication, and costly customer communication campaigns.
4. Enhanced Document Management and Disclosure Readiness: While Italian procedure excludes traditional discovery mechanisms, collective redress frameworks permit expanded document disclosure requirements. Financial institutions should establish comprehensive document retention, privilege protocols, and production procedures in advance of potential litigation exposure.

Sector-Specific Considerations: Given the financial sector's regulatory complexity and heightened consumer protection focus, institutions should prioritize compliance monitoring in consumer credit practices, contractual terms transparency, and digital service reliability to mitigate collective action vulnerability.

In 2025, Mexico implemented a sweeping judicial reform, ushering in a profound transformation of its judiciary. The reform replaced career judicial appointments with judges elected by popular vote, significantly reshaping the structure and functioning of the judicial system. Additionally, Mexico’s class action system faced significant challenges: strict commonality requirements, the opt-in model, and protracted appeals processes often delay justice. For financial institutions, these hurdles translate into prolonged uncertainty around consumer lending, investment products, and data privacy disputes, making proactive risk management and coordinated defense strategies essential to protecting client trust and regulatory standing.

Mexico has enacted and implemented a judicial reform, transitioning to a system where judges are elected by popular vote. This shift introduces significant uncertainty. Banks and financial services companies should anticipate heightened scrutiny of consumer contracts, lending practices, and digital services, as judicial decisions may increasingly respond to populist concerns. Building resilient compliance frameworks and preparing for uneven enforcement will be critical to navigating this environment.

2025 has to date seen a number of key developments in the UK class action landscape for financial institutions, which continue to shape this evolving risk area for the industry.

The Civil Justice Council (CJC) published recommendations for comprehensive reform of litigation funding in the UK. This statutory advisory body made a number of wide-ranging recommendations, including notably a proposed requirement in collective, group, or representative proceedings that the funder and the funded party’s lawyer certify to the court that they did not approach the funded party to seek their agreement to pursue proceedings. That would, if implemented, represent a significant shift in how such proceedings could be conceived of and instituted. This and the CJC’s various other proposals are currently under review by the UK Government.

The UK Department for Business and Trade has launched a call for evidence to support a review of the operation and impact of the opt-out collective actions regime that has operated in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) for the last decade (and the CAT is the only forum where that regime is available in the UK). The stated purpose of the review is to consider whether the regime is delivering access to justice for consumers in a way that brings value without being disproportionately burdensome on business, observing that the value (and cost) of such claims has been far higher than originally anticipated by the Government. In due course, financial institutions will want to consider the proposals for change once formulated and published.

In May 2025, the CAT handed down judgment to approve the opt-out settlement agreed in Merricks v Mastercard, a high-profile and long-running opt-out claim seeking damages of over £14 billion from a major credit card provider. The parties agreed to settle for £200m, and the settlement was challenged by the claimant’s funder on the basis that it was too low and did not represent a “just and reasonable” outcome. While expressing a view that the sum was ‘disappointing’, the CAT approved the settlement despite the funder’s objections. The CAT acknowledged the need for class representatives to have access to well-funded legal representation, but observed that, in its view, the collective actions regime should operate for the benefit of class members and not primarily for the benefit of lawyers and funders. This case may further develop the jurisprudence in this important area, because the funder has announced that it has applied for judicial review of the CAT’s decision regarding how the settlement sum would be apportioned and distributed as between the class members, the funder, and an access to justice charity.

Outside the CAT, the large-scale diesel emissions group actions are heading to a substantive trial in October 2025, although the financing aspects of the claims will not be considered until a later date. All of those proceedings involve Group Litigation Orders (GLOs), but the courts are demonstrating increasing flexibility in the way mass claims are managed. An application for a GLO was rejected in respect of claims against a number of financial institutions relating to Payment Protection Insurance policies that were sold on a commission basis. The Court was not persuaded that the procedural ‘super-structure’ of a GLO would deliver any cost savings and was unattracted by the claimants’ argument that consumers with low-value claims would otherwise lose access to justice. The Court also considered that the fact-specific enquiry called for under the unfair debtor/creditor relationship regime could not be satisfactorily dealt with compendiously under an ‘omnibus’ claim form and ordered each claimant to file their own claim form.  

This ‘omnibus claim’ approach was, however, recently considered and endorsed in the context of eight claims brought by (in aggregate) several thousand borrowers against motor finance lenders. Whilst such claims can be viable, they cannot operate on an ‘opt in’/‘opt out’ basis and contain no mechanism to deal with ‘tag along’ claims where claimants have no obligation to contribute to a funder’s costs. The case management decision endorsing the omnibus approach in that case is under appeal to be heard in the Court of Appeal in April 2026 and will be watched carefully not only by motor finance lenders, but by all financial institutions who may be exposed to large volumes of claims with superficial factual similarity.

Professional representatives acting in mass consumer claims have seen public criticism from their regulators, including on how consumer motor finance claims have been aggressively marketed. The Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA) has highlighted what it describes as significant concerns over poor practice by firms in high-volume consumer claims and has taken the exceptional step of contacting firms active in the high-volume claims sector, requiring them to complete a mandatory declaration confirming they understand and are following the SRA’s rules.

Finally, claims by investors against issuers of listed securities for misleading, false or delayed statements or omissions under ss.90/90A Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 may be impacted by the judgment of the Privy Council in Jardine Strategic v Oasis Investments, which authoritatively abolished the so-called ‘Shareholder Rule’ and ruled that a company generally could, contrary to long-standing practice, assert legal advice privilege as against its own shareholder. This will likely make the pursuit of such claims more challenging for claimants. For passive investors, bringing such a claim is doubly challenging since a High Court judgment in October 2024 held that the test for reliance on a company statement requires the claimant to prove that they read or heard the representation.

We expect the shape of the UK class action landscape for financial institutions to continue to evolve through 2026.

Further clarity on the direction of regulatory reform on litigation funding, and on the operation of the opt-out collective redress regime in the CAT, may bring reassurance to claimants, although its impact on funding appetite will depend importantly on the details of the proposals for an industry which has, to date, been largely self-regulating. The CJC has recommended primary legislation to clarify the legality of funding arrangements, which may be welcomed. Funders will, however, be carefully considering the experience in the Merricks v Mastercard litigation and the funders’ return that undershot their expectations and watching the outcome of the funder’s challenge to the CAT’s ruling on the distribution of the agreed settlement in that case.

While a significant number of County Court claims had awaited the outcome of the lenders’ appeal on motor finance commissions to the Supreme Court in Summer 2025, and others may have been expected to follow, the judgment handed down in August 2025 limited the scope for those claims to succeed compared to the earlier Court of Appeal decision. Following the judgment, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) intervened very promptly and publicly to foreshadow its intention to consult on and implement a statutory consumer redress scheme seeking to address consumer harm. The consultation is expected to be launched in October 2025, and the FCA has said that, if the compensation scheme goes ahead, the first payments should be made in 2026. Firms will be watching closely how any such scheme responds proportionately, and how the stated desire of the FCA and the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to improve the response to ‘mass redress events’ outside Court proceedings develops in practice.

The FCA has been forthright in its consumer messaging that there is no need to use a professional representative to participate in any redress scheme. However, claimant firms (and their funders) will be considering whether litigation may nonetheless be a relatively more attractive route to enhance the perceived value and for consumers to recover any perceived shortfalls from the scheme. That may give rise to further pursuit of group actions in the consumer finance arena, where low-value individual claims can be uneconomic for representatives. The further appeal on case management of mass claims by way of omnibus claim forms will also be keenly watched.

The risk of ESG-related class actions also looms large for financial institutions, particularly with ever-evolving EU and UK disclosure requirements and the FCA’s recent Anti-Greenwashing Rule. With sustainability and good corporate behaviour remaining high on the political and legal agenda, added to consumer and investor expectations, the greenwashing risk is real and one that remains ripe for multi-claimant actions against firms.

Given that financial services firms are increasingly deploying AI in their operations and product offerings, the spectre of group action for AI-washing, where misleading statements are made in relation to a firm’s AI capabilities, looms large. The FCA has confirmed that it will not be introducing AI-specific rules, but the use of AI by firms will be subject to its existing regulatory regime. Hence, it’s unlikely that FCA will introduce a similar rule to its anti-greenwashing rule to address AI-washing, but in any event, existing FCA rules already require firms to ensure that they communicate information to consumers in a way that is fair, clear, and not misleading. And of course, the use of AI brings risks of other types of group claims, such as for negligent advice or improper use of data.

As the UK class action landscape continues to mature, 2026 is likely to be a year of further change.

There were no significant class action rulings in 2024 for financial institutions in particular, but plenty of action. 

In Cantero v. Bank of America, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the question of whether the National Bank Act (NBA) — the statute under which U.S. national banks are chartered, as opposed to their state and non-chartered counterparts — preempts state law was not affected by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, and continues to require a “nuanced, comparative analysis” of how the state law affects the bank’s activities. In declining to broaden the scope of preemption, the Supreme Court effectively maintained the current applicability of state-law claims — often pursued in a putative class action setting — and thus ensured national banks would have to continue to fight those cases.

In a major securities class action involving a financial institution, the Second Circuit reconsidered and reversed its own prior precedent concerning claims involving auditor opinions, holding this year that standardized language in auditor opinions may be material to investors. The decision, while important across sectors, creates additional risk around audit disclosures commonly used for and by financial institutions.

2024 also continued to see a trend of class actions challenging the enforceability of arbitration agreements, largely within the context of employment disputes with employees and claims from retail banking consumers, ranging across products such as mortgage and credit card services. Mandatory arbitration clauses remained a robust defense against class actions, with motions to compel arbitration prevailing at a high rate of success across the federal courts.

With the growing issue of data privacy in an ever-technological world, financial institutions have been targeted in data breach putative class actions stemming from their presence and provision of services online.

Finally, the growing trend of ESG-related and “greenwashing” claims against companies, largely in the class-action space, affected financial institutions, whose profile and disclosures make them a potentially attractive target. 

Amidst this shifting landscape, we can expect to see a continued increase in data privacy class actions, based on the meteoric rise in data-breach suits filed by plaintiffs in 2024. In the absence of a federal statute that would regulate data privacy uniformly across the United States, eight states are poised to enact data privacy laws in 2025, and we expect putative class actions utilizing these laws to be pursued with vigor. 

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the issue of class certification for Rule 23(b)(3) damages classes that include class members without an injury. The Court’s ruling in Davis will greatly affect the potential exposure to damages faced by financial institutions, depending on the extent to which the Court allows for certified classes to include uninjured class members.

The issue of expert evidence admissibility at the class certification stage is also anticipated to develop further this year. Currently, some circuits require a Daubert analysis of admissibility before involvement within class certification proceedings, whereas others proceed on a limited, or otherwise flexible, analysis. 

We also expect applications of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which overruled the longstanding Chevron framework of affording deference to reasonable federal agency interpretations of ambiguous statutory provisions. This is likely to afford defendant financial institutions a broader range of strategies to rebut unfavorable statutory interpretations by regulatory bodies and attempts by plaintiffs to leverage such interpretations.

Finally, in addition to the growth in “greenwashing” claims, we anticipate an increase in “AI washing claims” (that is, claims that a company’s statements regarding its artificial intelligence programs were false or misleading in some way) in 2025, including against financial institutions.