A report by The Payments Association, UK Finance and global law firm Latham & Watkins has explored the current and future trends in the UK payment industry regulation.
The trio published ‘UK Payments Regulation Review: Making sense of where to go now’ which explored the impact of regulation and outlined how industry, lawmakers and regulators can work together to strengthen and enhance the country’s payment infrastructure and regulatory and supervisory frameworks following Brexit and the continuing trend of digitalisation.
According to TPA, the report identifies a number of key opportunities that lawmakers, regulators and industry may wish to take advantage of. With payments as a foundational pillar of the financial services market and wider economy, as well as a creator of jobs and investment, the report outlines how the payments sector can drive change, in-part, through self-regulation and how its future should involve collaboration between market participants and regulatory stakeholders.
The report also discusses how UK payment companies operate internationally, the importance of international market infrastructure access and the need for regulations to continue to provide international parity to support and reduce friction in, cross-border payments.
The Payments Association director general Tony Craddock said, “It is an exciting and challenging time to be in the payments space. In a very short time, we have seen the explosive growth of the FinTech industry, the arrival of distributed ledger technology like cryptocurrency and stablecoins and the UK leaving the EU while simultaneously adopting PSD2 regulations. This is a timely report that grapples with the major issues in the payments industry and produces ideas on how to create the next generation of regulations, and we are keen to see how the wider industry reacts to the proposals we make.”
