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PSD2 and the Future of Payment Services in Europe

Open Banking is a major topic of discussion in the United States as a potential solution to the lack of competition in the marketplace.  The European payments services directive (“PSD2”) is the most comprehensive Open Banking initiative we are aware of, and its progress is a good barometer of whether such regulations can successfully introduce new competition in payments.  Our London office prepared the...

Payments News Update -- April 17, 2019

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Law360 – April 16, 2019 An appeals court in London on Tuesday revived a £14 billion ($18.3 billion) proposed class action lawsuit accusing Mastercard of flouting European Union competition law by charging consumers high credit card fees, in a test of the U.K.’s fledgling class action regime.  The Court of...

Visa’s Proposed Acquisition of Earthport – A Good Test for Antitrust in the 21st Century

As the 2020 Presidential election begins to heat up, something unusual is happening – antitrust policy is being bandied about as an election issue.  The reason for this is simple.  We live in an era of increasing concentrations of wealth and industrial power.  While the impulse to look at antitrust as part of the solution makes perfect sense, many of the proposals on the table, including the suggestion by one...

Adyen Offers PSD2 Payments to European Merchants, and U.S. Merchants Should Take Notice

Adyen (Surinamese for "start over again") is a growing Netherlands-based payment platform. Adyen is among the leading providers whose business model is designed to capitalize on the European Union’s Payment Service Directive (“PSD2”), which requires banks to offer application programming interfaces (“APIs”) for third parties to initiate direct bank-to-merchant payments.  The company recently announced a...

Payment News Update - April 10, 2019

Legal and Regulatory Developments SPOTLIGHT: Law360 - April 4, 2019 Britain’s antitrust watchdog said Thursday that it has opened a preliminary investigation into whether Visa’s £247 million ($324 million) offer for payment network Earthport PLC will hinder competition in the U.K.’s cross-border payments sector.  The Competition and Markets...

Does the Apple Card Signal Apple’s Plan to Ultimately Disrupt the Payments Industry?

Apple made big news last week when it announced its entry into subscription services, ranging from news to video streaming services.  Antitrust commentators, justifiably, expressed concerns that Apple might exploit the market power it enjoys via its dominant platform to undermine competition in those industries.  Obscured by the mainstream press attention regarding Apple’s foray into subscription services was...

The Arrival of the China Pays

The payments news last week was dominated by Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook promised that its newly introduced Apple Card and its Apple Pay platform will “transform another fundamental method of payment.” But many payments professionals are equally intrigued by the steady unveiling of potentially more impactful disruptors. These disruptors come not from the innovation labs at Cupertino, but from China. Two companies,...

Payments News Update - April 3, 2019

South China Morning Post - April 2, 2019 A trade deal between President Xi Jinping and United States counterpart Donald Trump could finally fulfil a long-delayed promise to open up China’s 208.1 trillion yuan (US$31 trillion) market for credit cards and other third-party payment processors to American companies like...

Why the Fed Needs to Offer a Real-Time Payments Alternative

The U.S. continues to be an embarrassing laggard in payments.  While the rest of the developed world spent the last 25 years implementing Chip & PIN to reduce fraud, the United States continued to rely on signatures and magnetic stripes.  That was the equivalent of the world migrating to personal computers, while Americans remained loyal to the typewriter.  Remarkably, while we have begun to use Chip based cards we...

Facebook's Foray into Payments: Revolutionary or More of the Same?

To merchants, the evolution of digital payments was supposed to be a “get out of jail” card that released them from the shackles of the current payment system.  That dream could be reduced to the following proposition - the technology industry could conquer any industry. If anyone could disintermediate Visa and Mastercard and shake up payments, it would be Apple. Facebook, Google, Samsung, or some other tech...