On 12 December 2019, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (Basel Committee) published a discussion paper seeking views on a range of issues related to the prudential regulatory treatment of crypto-assets. The responses to the discussion paper will inform the Basel Committee’s development of a prudential treatment for crypto-assets at large, including for crypto-assets that are issued by regulated financial institutions, or that make use of stabilisation tools. The Basel Committee is continuing to assess…

On 12 December 2019, the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) published a report on wholesale digital tokens, focussing on their potential for use as a means of settling wholesale transactions. Wholesale transactions are typically settled by updating account balances recorded on a centralised register such as a settlement institution’s ledger. But the development of distributed ledger technology has led to the possibility of digital cryptographic tokens being used as an asset to effect…

On 9 December 2019, the European Payments Council published the 2019 Payment Threats and Fraud Trends Report, which provides an overview of the most important threats in the European payments landscape. The report provides an overview of the most important threats in the payments landscape, including social engineering and phishing, malware, advanced persistent threats (APT), mobile device related attacks, (distributed) denial of service, botnets and threats related to cloud services, big data, internet of…

On 5 December 2019, the Council of the EU (Council) published a press release stating that the Council and the European Commission (Commission) have adopted a joint statement on stablecoins. The statement calls for a co-ordinated global response to tackle the challenges raised by global stablecoins and a emphasises the need to ensure legal clarity about the status of stablecoin arrangements. Entities intending to issue stablecoins, or conduct other activities involving them in the EU,…

On 4 December 2019, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced its final decision to vary the Retail Banking Market Investigation Order 2017 (the Order) and remove Part 6 of the Order relating to overdraft alerts. It has also published the Variation Order and Explanatory Note and a Notice of Variation. The CMA has concluded that the introduction of the new FCA rules on consumer overdrafts starting from 18 December 2019 represents a change…

On 28 November 2019, the European Banking Authority (EBA) published its final guidelines on ICT and security risk management (the Guidelines). The Guidelines are addressed to financial institutions, which for these purposes are: payment services providers (PSPs) as defined in Article 4(11) of the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) and credit institutions and investment firms subject to the Capital Requirements Regulation. The Guidelines also apply to Member State competent authorities. The Guidelines set out expectations…

On 26 November 2019, the European Central Bank (ECB) published a speech given by Benoît Cœuré, ECB executive board member, entitled “Crossing the chasm to the retail payments of tomorrow”. In his speech, Mr Cœuré explains the ECB’s governing council decision to relaunch its retail payments strategy. The aim of the strategy is to actively foster pan-European market initiatives for retail payments at the location of the purchase or interaction (POI payments). The ECB is…