Fintech trade association warns payment systems of increasing regulatory liabilities
The Emerging Payments Association, one of the major fintech trade associations supporting over 100 of the country’s leading technology innovations in the financial services sector, has launched a new industry white paper, entitled Who carries the can? Indirect Access to Payment Systems: The Implications of Liability.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a resource on how impending directives and reformations in fintech will affect the liability of payment system providers. There are multiple UK regulators, regulations, and laws, all of which will impact the liability across a transaction chain, making it too simple to assume that there is a single answer.
This is why the EPA has produced this report, addresses the regulatory and legal provider responsibilities, as well as participant responsibilities in indirect access arrangements, where the participant uses the bank account to make or receive payments for its customers.
Why is this important?
Impending Payment Services Directive changes (PSD2) will see the fintech industry generating what the Bank of England this year called a ‘reformation – a more diverse, resilient and effective system for consumers. One where large banks exist alongside new entrants who compete across the value chain’.
Member States need to ensure access to bank accounts ‘on an objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate basis’.
What is stifling new entrants to market?
It is commonly held that the lack of bank account provision may be stifling competition for new entrants into the payments market, yet there is no evidence that this is because of competition fears by the provider banks, despite headlines that suggest otherwise.
Instead, this paper reveals that while regulation has caused the costs and complexities involved in engaging with and monitoring the activities of the new and smaller regulated entities, it still comes with risk attached.
Tony Craddock, director general of the Emerging Payments Association, said:
“The regulatory environment for payment providers is changing, with new legislation being introduced which will have a material impact on the way the sector operates. Many of these changes are complex and will introduce new levels of liability, which is why the EPA has published this paper.”
