The U.S. Treasury and FinCen are addressing the importance of money services businesses (MSBs) to the financial system in the wake of reports that banks are refusing to do business with categories of companies, such as remittance companies and check cashers, because of the perceived risk of doing business with them following government agencies’ aggressive efforts in fighting money laundering.
A group of state and national merchant associations, 44 in all, sent a letter to congressional leaders today calling for the establishment of a single, national standard for notifying American consumers when businesses suffer a breach of security involving financial data or other sensitive personal information.
MasterCard Canada and Visa Canada are reducing interchange fees to an average net effective 1.5 percent rate for the next five years for consumer credit cards.
Yantra Financial Technologies, an electronic payment systems developer, has integrated its latest system for risk scoring of payments with the Ripple real-time settlement protocol. The integration means that institutions using the Ripple protocol can analyse transactions in seconds, including what other payments the customer recently made and potential concerns regarding a specific transaction. Risk levels can be assigned to certain transactions based on pre-determined criteria.
After a somewhat vague notice of its next field hearing, the CFPB updated its blog to specify that “prepaid accounts” will be the topic of the hearing, scheduled for 11 a.m. EST, Thursday, Nov. 13, in Wilmington, Del.—an exact location has not been given.
Yesterday the CFPB posted on its Website the announcement of its next field hearing, 11 a.m. EST, Thursday, Nov. 13, in Wilmington, Del.
While more than a quarter of American households still were either unbanked or underbanked last year, as was the case in 2011, the proportion of unbanked households declined to 7.7 percent or 9.6 million households, compared with 8.2 percent in 2011, according to the latest report from the FDIC.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last week signed a law giving Visa and MasterCard a five-month reprieve from paying a huge security deposit for operating in Russia, according to The Moscow Times.
FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion will meet this week to discuss the results of the 2013 National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households.
Finding ways to use GPR prepaid card usage data as a tool to help thin- and no-file consumers build credit has been an enticing yet elusive goal for the industry for years.
In light of the intense regulatory focus and pressure on prepaid cards, it’s time for program managers to step up and manage their own compliance to the point of being “exam-ready.”
Retailers and financial institutions struggle with costs of data breaches.
TD Bank has reached a settlement over a 2012 data breach that compromised customers’ personal information.
President Obama hours ago signed an executive order making chip-and-PIN card technology the standard for the federal government.
DOJ’s Operation Choke Point, which encourages financial institutions to scrutinize clients that process payments for certain types of businesses, continues to draw criticism from lawmakers and industry advocates, who argue that the policy is harmful to legitimate, legal businesses.
The social contract between the banking system and society is fundamentally broken. We deserve a financial system that we can all be proud of, one that is fairer and more sustainable than the current iteration.
The CFPB is gathering information about the methods banks and credit unions use to screen consumers before approving or denying them a checking account.
New Jersey legislation (A3480) introduced last June, which would eliminate the need to collect consumer data when purchasing GPR prepaid cards, was advanced last week by the Assembly Consumer Affairs Committee and has been referred to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
While banks want to root out fraudulent activity as much as governments do they “need to take the temperature down”, said Bob Werner, global head of financial crime compliance and group general manager at HSBC. Speaking at a panel session on trends in financial crime compliance, Werner said: “Every time something goes wrong we don’t need the scalp of a regulator or the scalp of a banker.”
The threat of banks de-risking and exiting regions and businesses in fear of sanctions-related fines is upon us, said Juan Zarate, the ex-deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism to US President George W Bush. Zarate was speaking at a Standard Chartered session yesterday morning about his new book, Treasury Wars: The Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.
Global financial markets are experiencing a paradigm shift as governments, regulators and participants recalibrate the processes and structures underpinning global finance. The challenge is to repair and remedy where needed, with dialogue between central banks, regulators and participants, but also to avoid creating fragmented markets or worse, unintentionally reintroducing risk.
The Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the European Union law-making body, has recommended tightening regulations regarding customer authentication and protection of sensitive payment data related to mobile wallets, according to its recently released proposal of the revised Payment Services Directive.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission will hold a public meeting next week to discuss Bitcoin and the CFTC’s jurisdiction regarding derivatives contracts that reference the decentralized digital currency.
A key payments industry group is throwing its support behind tokenization—with a few caveats as to the hurdles that remain before broad industry adoption can occur, including coordinating different tokenization models.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has determined that the CFPB must take additional measures to mitigate risk of “improper collection, use or release of consumer financial data,” according to a recently released report.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has stepped up its drive to monitor and enforce the financial markets by implementing new surveillance tools to examine and inspect reconciliations. The deal comes as the US regulator charges Barclays with failing to build adequate compliance systems and the bank suffers a fine in the UK.
If you were watching 60 Minutes on Sunday night, your heart probably stopped during the story on “The Tax Refund Scam.”
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Direct Express Debit MasterCard program now serves nearly one-quarter of the nation’s entire unbanked population, a recent cardholder survey confirms.
Did Canada’s Supreme Court just create a significant regulatory issue for the country’s prepaid issuers? According to at least one prominent Canadian attorney who’s following the court’s decisions, it appears quite possible—although more investigation is needed.
Mobile financial services can play an important role among a large group of American consumers. That much the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association, the FTC and consumer organizations, including U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Center for Digital Democracy, agree on.
Comerica Bank, the incumbent issuer of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Direct Express prepaid debit card program to distribute benefits to Social Security recipients, will continue in that role under a new five-year agreement, according to a blog post published today on the department’s Website.
The European Union’s Court of Justice has ruled that interchange fees charged for cross-border card payments by MasterCard were too high, bringing an end to a seven-year court battle over the fees.
Home Depot confirmed suspicions that it is the victim of a customer data breach.
The NBPCA responds to the CU report on student cards.
EY is inviting start-up tech companies to compete in a competition looking for solutions to the problems posed by “right to be forgotten” regulations.
The bailout of Espirito Santo Bank brings back unwelcome memories of the events of the last financial crisis and raises the spectre of moral hazard returning to the financial services industry both in the UK and abroad. But how far have we really come since those dark days of 2008 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and how far do we still have to go? A quick look at recent events gives us a good indication.
The CFPB has finalized its remittance transfer rule requiring remittance transfer providers to disclose certain third-party fees and any exchange rates applicable to the transfer.
India’s central bank now requires all card-not-present transactions for purchases within the country to be routed through a bank in India, with funds settled only in Indian currency.
The merchant groups embroiled in a long-running legal battle over debit interchange fees have petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case on the grounds that the Federal Reserve improperly took into account certain costs incurred by card issuers when calculating debit interchange fee limits. However, the retailers have not challenged a separate rule governing the number of unaffiliated debit card networks that must be available for debit and prepaid card transactions, which is good news for card issuers because it gives much longed-for certainty around a challenging issue.
The Consumer Bankers Association is taking umbrage over what it says are vague allegations by the CFPB’s private education loan ombudsman regarding agreements colleges and universities have with financial institutions to provide financial products to students.
