The U.K.’s Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) plans a sea change to the U.K. payments system after determining an inability for new payments infrastructure projects to compete as alternatives to the three interbank payment systems, Bacs, Faster Payments Service (FPS) and LINK.
Cybercriminals have stolen about $31 million from Russian Central Bank accounts, according to a Reuters report. The hackers broke into bank accounts after faking a client’s credentials, a bank spokesman said at a briefing, disclosing few other details. In a separate instance, Russia had recently warned about a plot by foreign countries to wage cyberattacks on its financial institutions.
Fintech companies seeking charters would have to fulfill multiple requirements under the proposal, including performing core banking services.
As with any long-term human relationship, our relationship with banks is complicated. There’s a sense of co-dependence, transgressions that shake our trust, the occasional fleeting thought of escape. How to reignite the magic spark between a bank and its customer?
Incentives that banks offer employees to increase sales can pose “significant” risks to consumers, the CFPB warned this week in a new bulletin following record fines assessed to Wells Fargo for opening millions of unauthorized consumer accounts.
Apple has scored a big win in Australia for the company’s mobile wallet. That country’s competition regulator has denied a request by big local banks to collectively negotiate over the introduction of Apple Pay there.
The European Banking Authority in January is set to release its online transaction rules in response to the revised Payment Services Directive, or PSD2, which calls for “strong customer authentication” for online payments. Visa also opposes the measure.
The FDIC’s final rule establishing recordkeeping requirements for large financial institutions offers some relief for banks that hold prepaid accounts insured under pass-through coverage, but there’s still a lot of heavy lifting to be done for covered institutions.
Visa has modified and clarified debit network routing rules, following recent FAQ guidance issued from the Federal Reserve and to address a Federal Trade Commission inquiry.
It’s infographics time! A great compilation of fintech companies, showing how we’ve gone from graph paper to personal data algorithms – and everything in between.
The CFPB has filed a motion for a rehearing before the entire appellate court after a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sent shockwaves in October when it determined the structure of the bureau is unconstitutional because it’s led by a single director who can only be removed by the president for just cause.
A European plan for new online transaction authentications has come under fire from Visa, which says the proposal will make online checkout needlessly complicated for consumers.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 17 ruled in favor of allowing an antitrust class-action lawsuit against Mastercard, Visa and their bank partners proceed after a lower court ruled that the consumer plaintiffs had no standing, according to a Reuters report.
Republican legislators and business associations, emboldened by Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid, have set their sights on the CFPB, an agency that’s been in Republicans’ crosshairs since the day it was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. Meanwhile, retailers are calling on Congress to steer clear of introducing legislation that would repeal financial services reforms they say are critical to U.S. businesses and consumers.
With a growing number of products and services available to help consumers manage their finances electronically, being able to do so means sharing their digital financial records.
Now that Visa’s EMV debit card routing has come under Federal Trade Commission investigation, eight U.S. retail trade groups are pressing the payments network to say how it will fix the problem.
There is little doubt that there is some very innovative work being carried out in the payments world. Digital technologies, including distributed ledger and artificial intelligence, are beginning to be applied to retail and corporate payments. But in the age of digital finance, a dinosaur of payments – cheques – persist.
It’s blockchain infographics time!
The Federal Trade Commission has charged NetSpend with deceiving cardholders and denying or delaying their access to funds, but the prepaid provider says any delays stem from federal regulations and that consumers are not being deceived.
Our new series of thrillers – produced and directed by CustomerXPs and Banking Technology – narrate the tales of the fight between the forces of good (the Clari5 analytics and anti-fraud software) and the forces of evil. Based on real events and guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat!
Electronic payments providers in India are celebrating the Indian government’s abolition of the Rs 500 ($7.46) and Rs 1,000 ($14.92) currency notes, which went into effect Nov. 8, because it’s driving transactions to their platforms.
As an online retailer heading into the holidays with approximately $105 billion in sales up for grabs, competing for spend is a top priority.
With a victory that took the pollsters by surprise, Trump’s win sent the markets plummeting overnight. Although reports suggest markets are steadying, what’s in store for the U.S. payments and financial services industry in the wake of this election?
Prison cards are under fire again, this time in Arizona. Bank of America has been named in a proposed class action lawsuit over claims the bank charged excessive fees on prepaid cards issued to former prison inmates in the state.
U.K.-based Tesco Bank was the victim of a security breach over the weekend that exposed thousands of customer accounts, half of which had money removed. The bank’s fraud security systems detected “suspicious activity” Nov. 5, affecting approximately 40,000 accounts, and 20,000 of those accounts had money stolen from them, a Tesco Bank spokesperson tells Paybefore.
California already has a way to protect consumers from predatory lending practices while also encouraging the kind of innovation that leads to increased access to responsible and affordable credit—especially for those most often left out of the financial mainstream.
Oct. 5, 2016, the CFPB released its final rule governing prepaid accounts. The final rule and its commentary come in at nearly 1,700 pages. Find out what products are covered under the rule, what triggers Reg Z and what still needs clarifications before the regulations go into effect Oct. 1, 2017.
There has been a tremendous amount of excitement and discussion about the potential of blockchain technology to transform the financial services industry and beyond. But the only thing that is clear at the moment is that there is still a lot of work to be done to implement wide scale use cases, clear up any regulatory uncertainly or barriers and educate institutions and employees about the technology and its potential.
A Pennsylvania appeals court has sided with McDonald’s employees, deciding that the owners of 16 franchises were in violation of the state’s Wage Payment and Collection Law (WPCL) by requiring employees to be paid with payroll debit cards. The court filed its decision Oct. 21, 2016, which stems from a 2013 lawsuit—consisting of a class of 2,380 current and former employees, according to Law360—alleging that franchise owners Albert and Carol Mueller made it mandatory that employees’ wages be paid through payroll card rather than cash or check.
The payments industry went just a bit blockchain bonkers at this year’s Sibos. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) was a hot topic throughout the week. This was quite astounding given there are very few examples of working blockchain or DLT use cases; most of the initiatives under way are proofs of concept.
In the wake of a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that shut down hundreds of Websites in October, the Smart Card Alliance has issued a warning on the “critical need” to ramp up security on hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected devices. It’s those devices—which range from cars to refrigerators and make up the Internet of Things (IoT)—that hackers are hijacking and incorporating into their botnet attacks, making attacks large enough to overwhelm Websites’ defenses—as was the case in the most recent attack, which affected major Websites including Twitter, Netflix and Spotify, among others.
New York State’s pioneering BitLicense program could be losing momentum after the departure of New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) head Benjamin Lawsky last year. The state has issued just two BitLicenses since enacting the program in June 2015, shortly before Lawsky left the agency. Another 15 licenses are pending, while four applications have been withdrawn and four others have been denied, according to Reuters, citing an NYDFS spokesperson.
As part of its mission to improve the U.S. payments system, the Federal Reserve’s Secure Payments Task Force is seeking industry input on ways to beef up security. Industry members can provide comment through online surveys, which are separated into the task force’s three areas of focus: payment identity management, information sharing for the mitigation of payment risk/fraud and data protection.
No more drowning in tons of paper and receiving eye-watering bills from lawyers – Drooms introduces a brand new virtual data room, Drooms NXG. The work is a result of a two-year development, says Jan Hoffmeister, managing director and co-founder of Drooms, and features self-learning software and automatic translation from core European languages to English. […]
It may come as no surprise that the CFPB’s latest monthly complaint snapshot released Oct. 25 focuses on complaints related to prepaid products, considering the agency released its long-awaited final prepaid accounts rule earlier this month. But despite the bureau’s contention that “the report shows that consumers continue to experience issues trying to manage their accounts and access funds,” prepaid-related complaints to the bureau dropped 21 percent in September.
A group of Australia’s biggest banks have launched the latest salvo in their dispute with Apple over third-party access to the iPhone’s NFC hardware. In a joint filing to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the banks rebuffed Apple’s claims that they should not be allowed to collectively negotiate with the tech giant over making their own mobile payment apps available on iPhones.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a final rule Oct. 5 to correct “certain clerical and non-substantive” errors it found in Regulation E, which implements the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. The rule was published in the Federal Register Oct. 12 and the corrections take effect Nov. 14, 2016.
Our new series of thrillers – produced and directed by CustomerXPs and Banking Technology – narrate the tales of the fight between the forces of good (the Clari5 fraud prevention software) and the forces of evil (fraudsters). Based on real events and guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat!
The CFPB has announced three leadership changes within the agency.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Oct. 11 deemed the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) unconstitutional because of it being led by a single director, calling the bureau a “gross departure from settled historical practice” in which independent agencies are led by commissioners or board members, according to the court’s decision.
