Regulating digital payment services and e-money

Improvements in technology, coupled with growing demand for digital payment methods, are increasingly reshaping the way payments are made. Non-bank institutions now offer a wide range of retail payment services. This raises the question of where the regulatory perimeter should be drawn. Financial authorities now face the task of deciding whether the risk profile of different payment services are appropriately reflected in their regulatory frameworks. A sound understanding of the regulatory approaches in other jurisdictions contributes to this assessment.

Johannes Ehrentraud, Jermy Prenio, Codruta Boar, Mathilde Janfils and Aidan Lawson have had a paper published by the BIS' Financial Stability Unit entitled "Fintech and payments: regulating digital payment services and e-money".

Download an read it HERE.

Banking & Payment Trends that Will Get Hotter in 2021

There are 5 banking and payments trends that are going to be really hot in 2021; that is according to a piece by Safwan Zaheer writing in a blog post in The Financial Brand.

And what are these 5 trends?

1. Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) will take off.
2. Venmo will emerge as a new type of payment tender.
3. “Embedded Banking” is going to grow faster as more institutions offer banking capabilities to non-banks.
4. Digital currencies and Stablecoins are going to gain major traction.
5. There are going to be more financial institution mergers in 2021.

Read all the details at The Financial Brand HERE  

Cryptocurrencies - Investors allege that Tether deliberately inflated a mega-bubble

Launched as Realcoin in July 2014, Tether aimed to become a more reliable alternative to Bitcoin. Today with a $4.1bn market capitalisation, it is now the fifth-largest virtual currency. However, its efforts to gain investors’ trust have fallen short. On October 6th, a group filed a class-action lawsuit in New York, accusing Tether of being “part-fraud, part-pump-and-dump, and part-money laundering”. They call for truly startling damages: more than $1.4trn.

Read more at The Economist