Several factors have converged in recent years to add complexity to the regulatory oversight of retail payments. These elements include new regulation and oversight along with technology advances that have created new payment types. The challenge for regulators in an environment with an abundance of innovation is to align that innovation with appropriate regulation to ensure consumer protection, data security, and fraud mitigation, and to retain consumer confidence in payments.
The 2008 financial crisis led to an increased focus within the regulatory framework on retail payment risk factors. One new regulation was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (Dodd-Frank). Dodd-Frank led to many changes—including the creation of a regulatory agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), to focus exclusively on consumer protection. Since the CFPB was created, two of the payments types it has identified as deserving of its oversight are remittances and prepaid cards.
At the same time, evolving technology continues to change the nature of how consumers make payments—moving from the physical to the virtual—and has increased consumers' expectations for speed, control, information, and transparency. Options available for consumers to make payments and for businesses and financial institutions to participate in offering payment services have multiplied as Internet and mobile evolved, cloud-based solutions progressed, and virtual currencies expanded.
Technological advances have led to a retail payments system that is more transparent than ever before, in which all types of entities, from start-up companies to financial institutions, are able to innovate. Nonbank entities are flourishing in retail payments, challenging the historic role of financial institutions as primary payment participants by offering payments products and services in an ever-more complex payments landscape.
While some participants complain that there is too much regulation of payments practices, others call for more or different regulation when problems arise. Still others call for change because they believe the playing field is not level for all participants. Sometimes regulation can be a catalyst for innovation by legitimizing a payments practice after clarifying requirements for all participants. Whatever your perspective, it is a complex undertaking to attain the delicate balance between innovation and oversight.
By Deborah Shaw, a payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed