There will be pressure on financial firms - particularly those part-nationalised by the government - to pay out quickly if they fail in the High Court case.
UK banks could be forced to pay out £1 billion in charges, if they lose an ongoing High Court case looking into their fairness.
A total of eight financial firms are involved in the legal process, which was set up to decide whether the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has the power to rule on if the fees are excessive or not. The penalties are commonly levied for offences including exceeding overdraft limits and come to around £35 each.
Hundreds of thousands of customers have applied to reclaim these charges - but all cases were frozen when the High Court case was announced last year. Since then, bank shares plummeted and the government was forced to part-nationalise three of the firms involved in the case, RBS, HBOS and Lloyds TSB.
Now, executives are thought to be worried about attracting negative publicity by refusing to pay out if they lose the latest stage of the case, the Observer reports.
Speaking to the newspaper, Sandy Chen at broker Panmure Gordon commented: "We estimate that the stock market-listed banks may have to shell out around £1 billion, if things go the wrong way for them."
A spokesman for Which?, the consumer group which has campaigned against the charges, added: "[The banks'] reputation has been damaged by the financial crisis."
