Law and Regulation

Over the past 10 years, regulators across the United States, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East have levied nearly $26 billion in financial penalties against financial institutions for anti-money laundering (AML), know your customer (KYC), and other sanctions-related violations. In today’s heightened regulatory climate, organizations need to be concerned with …

PayPal Holdings Inc. on Wednesday sued the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleging the regulatory agency’s 8-month-old prepaid rule represents a “category error” and a violation of the First Amendment, and should be vacated by the court. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, charges …

A new set of security protocols to better safeguard online connections within the financial-services industry is in the offing. Securing and trusting these connections is a critical piece of the payments infrastructure. Experts say the underlying standards they are built on—called public key infrastructure—need updating. That’s why the Accredited Standards …

A new standard unveiled Wednesday by the PCI Security Standards Council could pave the way for more acceptance of contactless payments with no more hardware needed than a merchant’s off-the-shelf mobile phone or tablet. The standard is dubbed Contactless Payments on COTS (commercial off-the shelf devices), or CPoC. It spells …

Prices for Federal Reserve payment services to depository financial institutions will go up by an average of 2.4% on Jan. 2 under a new fee schedule approved last week by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Fed estimates Check Services customers will see average price increases of 3.3%. Users …

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018. More than one year later, most financial organizations—including banks, payment and trading services, and global exchanges, as well as the companies that rely on them—are struggling to maintain GDPR compliance.  While prohibitive costs and the derailment of other, …

Confirming rumors that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into issues involving debit card transaction routing, Visa Inc. late last week reported the Federal Trade Commission has asked it to voluntarily provide information about its routing practices. In a brief notice in its fiscal 2019 report to the Securities and …

Checkers Drive-in Restaurants Inc., which in May said malware had affected certain of its Checkers and Rally’s locations, said it is aware the malware had affected one more Checkers and Rally’s location and also that the malware had been re-installed at “several” locations the company had previously identified as affected. The company …

Ever since Apple Pay debuted in 2014, Apple Inc. has kept the near-field communication chip in its devices off-limits to payment apps from other companies. But now legislation has appeared in Germany that may force the computing giant to grant access to that all-important chip, which allows Apple phones and …

U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) planned this week to introduce bills that would bar tech firms from developing their own cryptocurrencies and make it more difficult for non-financial firms to obtain charters for industrial-loan corporations, a form of a bank, according to Politico. Garcia’s office did not immediately respond to a request …