Payments challenges in financial services regulatory compliance

Globally the licensing of payments and value transfer services are largely provided brokers payment system through other limited or varied financial licenses in addition to full banking licenses (BCBS, 2018). These licenses are usually issued for money service businesses or ELMIs (EMIs in the UK). Clearing and settlement services are offered through financial licenses outside the banking sector. A majority of jurisdictions were found to have no licensing category for services relating to the issuance and transfer of non-fiat digital currency.

Essential Features of a Digital Core Banking Platform

The industry is https://www.xcritical.com/ undergoing significant changes driven by regulatory initiatives or by business requirements, leading to new technological innovations as well as collaboration between banking and with non-banking entities. Modern payment infrastructure powered by cloud-based technologies is enabling organizations to not only scale, but also thrive as volumes increase. This supports competition among payment services and introduces network effects that help services reach as many people as possible. The fourth step in the framework is to promote legal certainty through a transparent, comprehensive and sound legal framework for payment systems and services.

Leveraging AI for Business Transformation and Market Adaptability

Revolut’s new core cloud infrastructure, Stockbroker built on Google Cloud, balanced ease of use, automated deployment, and most critically, control over its security, particularly ensuring its multi-terabyte databases remain highly secure. This allowed Revolut to offer customers more innovative ways to manage their money without having to compromise on security. Cloud opens the door to advanced analytics and AI that allow payment processors to dive deep into their data and uncover fresh insights. Most cloud providers also enable payments firms to leverage cutting-edge AI models at speed and scale so they can derive insights and make decisions instantaneously on the enormous amounts of transactional data they process. Domain 2 covers payment platforms, which facilitate the ‘purchase’ step in the customer journey of the payer.

Global mobile wallets and super-apps

SCT Inst cloud-based payment as a service platform where an FI can plug and play all SCT Inst services, including reconciliation. FinTech companies are already starting to embrace advanced technologies and cloud-based models. They are focusing on not only embracing the new innovations but also on cost reduction, improving customer efficiency, developing customer-centric products, increasing security and ease of use, etc. Forthcoming cybersecurity threats can be addressed by enabling of cloudbased services and proper technology tools. All those who are part of the payments value chain are affected by the PSD2 derivatives. For the banks to remain in competition, they should consider strategic adaptations, collaborations, and API integration with selected players for building key use cases as value-creating opportunities.

Under the EU PSD1, payments made through a telecom operator were not covered, where the telecom operator acts as an intermediary between the consumer and the PSP (by operator billing or direct to phone-bill purchases). A Specialised Bank is limited to offering services such as investment advisory, securities brokerage, investment fund management, and other related services. I enjoy cybersecurity, fintech and, on the less boring side of things, photography, trains (I said less boring, right?) and, like everyone else, music. Six macro trends — driven by a combination of consumer preference, technology, regulation and M&A – will define how the next five years play out. We believe leadership teams need to understand each of these trends in order to properly plan for their future. Examples include the acquisition of Ingenico by French firm Worldline the same year, following its purchase of Swiss-based SIX Payment Services in 2018.

Money supply was responsive to changes in the monetary base and improved the implementation of monetary targeting and the impact on the velocity of money and inflation were also unfounded in these studies. The third step in the framework is to identify any emerging risks that may not be effectively addressed in the current regulatory framework. Domain 4 covers the role of Payment Service Providers (PSPs), and mainly focuses on aggregating payment methods and offering easy access to these methods for payment acceptance by merchants. The latest updates on the payments’ evolution in the last three years are depicted here by Innopay’s industry experts.

License selection depends on the client base, operational regions, activities, and business types. Delve into our article to gain insights into four distinct license types, each tailored to specific needs and industries. Explore which license aligns best with your business — payment, e-money, MSB, Fintech, or a banking license. Providers must strike a balance between faster payment processing and the careful management of data collection, data use, and mitigation of potential fraud or improper disclosure.

Licensing and how it affects your payments infrastructure

Several US-based players made moves in 2020 toward becoming so-called ‘super apps’ through the incorporation of diverse capabilities, such as interactive offers, cryptocurrency purchasing, banking services, investments and messaging. The embedded-finance opportunity remains in the early stages, but the market is quickly waking up to the transformative impact it has had for companies like Shopify, Lightspeed, Square SQ and Grab. 2021 is likely to be remembered as a breakout year for embedded finance, with more technology companies exploring ways to augment their offerings with richer, stickier and more lucrative user-value propositions through the incorporation of financial services.

The approach has also been considered in other jurisdictions, particularly in Africa. However, pass through deposit insurance is subject to the definition of “deposits” in existing legislation and the fulfillment of conditions such as the establishment of custodial relationships, and the recording of identities and amount of funds of each actual owner. Such criteria help establish a functional equivalence for similar services that may have deposit features and make them eligible for participation in the deposit insurance scheme. An important addition is the third-party payment initiation interface as required by the revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2). Banks are mandated to expose at least one interface (and a fallback mechanism, where required) to facilitate payment initiation by licenced third parties. These third parties require a specific PSD2 licence for the role of Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP), which is a regulated role under PSD2.

  • Payments also are supporting the development of digital economies and are driving innovation — all while functioning as a stable backbone for our economies.
  • Behind these transactions lie stringent regulatory frameworks, with money remittance licenses serving as the gateway for businesses to operate in this dynamic sector.
  • Other new forms of payment services have included third party initiation, tokenization, payment gateways, payment aggregators, and white label ATM/POS providers, which are not in the scope of this paper.
  • The recurring change in legacy financial services burdens incumbents with a huge IT operating cost.
  • While there are no compelling financial stability risks given the small size of fintech relative to the financial system, growth in such activities and the supervisory and regulatory issues have merited authorities’ attention (IMF, 2019; FSB, 2017a).
  • SCT Inst cloud-based payment as a service platform where an FI can plug and play all SCT Inst services, including reconciliation.

Such requirements would relate to capital allocation (for credit, market and operational risks), risk concentration, and liquidity. The ECB issued the Guide to Assessments of License Applications (second revised edition) in January 2019, which includes applications from fintech companies with an interest to becoming a credit institution. The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority established the New Bank Start-up Unit to consider applications from any firm seeking to be a bank. The Reserve Bank of India issued restricted payments bank licenses in 2015, which are subject to a minimum paid-up equity capital equivalent to USD 15 million.

Licensing and how it affects your payments infrastructure

The longstanding perception was that cloud was right for some, but not for financial services. It couldn’t deliver the processing speed or resilience required, nor would it be capable of addressing risk and compliance at the level needed within such a highly-regulated industry. With these changes looming large, there is growing pressure in the payments industry to build products faster, modernize and integrate legacy platforms, and extract more value from data to enable better customer experiences.

While a recent BIS survey suggests that 60% of central banks are considering CBDCs,  and 14% are actively conducting pilot tests. Observers believe that China may be the first to launch its digital renminbi — or “e-yuan” — at the Winter Olympics next year, in what may be seen as a prelude to the decentralisation of finance. Prominent private sector examples like the Diem, proposed in 2019 by Facebook as a form cryptocurrency that would be backed by a basket of sovereign currencies, could replace account-based payments with a tokenised system of non-sovereign payment systems. In 2014, the World Bank set a goal under its Universal Financial Access program that by 2020, adults who were not part of the formal financial system would be able to have access to a transaction account to store money and send and receive payments. How the payments matrix develops will be determined by the response of banks, technology companies, regulators, governments and consumers to arguably the most profound change in how money moves — even what defines money in our society — for decades to come.

In our survey, eight out of ten financial services organisations expected to have outsourced such infrastructure by 2025. Digital wallets allow consumers to load and store payment methods and access funding sources, such as cards or accounts, on their mobile devices. These wallets will be increasingly pivotal as a payment “front end,” as exemplified by Apple Pay, the relaunched Google Pay and the rise of super-apps WeChat Pay and Alipay in China. Not only are traditional ways of paying for goods and services — including the humble paper check and analogue invoices — set for radical transformation, but the entire infrastructure of payments is being reshaped, with new business models emerging. The financial services industry is in the midst of a significant transformation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.