Volume: 6 Issue: 12
(December 2012)

News

The US Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, announced on 12 November, the launch of an anti-money laundering (AML) task force to address gaps or redundancies in US AML obligations. / read more

The Bitcoin-Central exchange owned by Paymium announced on 7 December that it is partnering with registered PSP Aqoba and French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in order to legally hold balances in payment accounts within the European regulatory framework. / read more

The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) approved the ‘Oversight expectations for links between retail payment systems,’ on 23 November, which sets out Eurosystem oversight requirements for links between retail payment systems. / read more

Features

On 7 December 2012, the Joint Committee of the European Supervisory Authorities (‘Joint Committee’) published a report on the implementation of EU anti-money laundering (‘AML’) and counter terrorist financing (‘CTF’) requirements in the context of the electronic money regime. The report identifies significant differences in the national approaches to the AML/CTF supervision of e-money issuers, their agents and distributors providing services on their domestic territories and/or across the EU. Removing these differences will be important for the continued growth in the payments market in the EU. / read more

The latest edition of the European Payments Council's White Paper on mobile payments was released on 18 October 2012 and covers the EPC's main focus areas, including the initiation of payments using Mobile Contactless Payments and Mobile Remote Payments processes for SEPA Card Payments and SEPA Credit Transfer Payments, as Dr Sam De Silva and Maura Livingstone, of Manches LLP, discuss. / read more

California’s Song Beverly Credit Card Act continues to be debated in court. Questions surround the prohibitions in the Act regarding the collection and recording of personal identification information as part of a credit transaction and appropriate exemptions. Keri E. Campbell, Alysa Z. Hutnik and Christopher M. Loeffler, of Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, discuss the Act, the decisions so far and the on-going dispute involving Apple as to whether the Act applies to online transactions. / read more

US crowdfunding legislation, the 'Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act,' (the JOBS Act), was passed on 5 April 2012 and sought to create an exemption for certain crowdfunding offerings to enable small businesses to use the internet to raise up to $1 million in any 12-month period without registering the offering with federal or state securities regulators. Scott Kimpel and Ronald L. Rubin, of Hunton & Williams LLP, discuss the JOBS Act and the challenges posed by regulating crowdfunding. / read more

Little has been written about the bigger picture for the direction of regulation for payments, perhaps due to the lack of clear strategy in this area. Amanda Hulme, Partner at Addleshaw Goddard, explores the tensions faced by the authorities in setting such a strategy for payments regulation going forward. / read more

M-payments emergence in Asia and comparisons with Africa. / read more

'Ethical hacking' can include activities such as hacktivism, online civil disobedience, intrusion testing, security activism and counter-attack. Alana Maurushat, Acting Academic Director of the Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre at the University of New South Wales, discusses this latter branch of ethical hacking, which describes a self-help measure used in response to a computer offence. / read more

About Payments & FinTech Lawyer

The monthly publication covering legal, regulatory and policy developments relating to the fast-moving payments and FinTech sectors. Key topics include mobile payments, e-money, prepaid and other payment cards, online banking, digital currencies such as Bitcoin, card fraud and other cyber crime, RegTech, robo-advice, P2P lending, and crowdfunding, as well as regulatory regimes such as the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2), the Payment Accounts Directive, and the Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive / read more