UK Government Sets out Key Actions to Secure Its Vision for Payments

HM Treasury has published a response to the Payments Landscape Review call for evidence.  The government sets out the key areas and steps for government, regulators, and industry to achieve a payments sector at the vanguard of technology and innovation.  These include:
 

1. Preparing Faster Payments for the future, including enhancing consumer protection, particularly if errors occur.  This will, among other things, involve introducing Faster Payment rules on reimbursement and liability for all scheme participants;
2. Furthering Open Banking to enable safe and secure payments directly from consumer accounts instead of using debit and credit cards;
3. Improving cross-border payments so that individuals and businesses can easily make cross-border payments cheaply and quickly; and
4. Future-proofing payments legislation and regulation, including
   1. Consulting in the first half of 2022 on bringing systemically important firms in payments chains under the Bank of England’s regulatory and supervisory remit;
   2. Progressing the proposals to introduce a Senior Managers & Certification Regime for financial market infrastructures;
   3. Adopting a “same risk, same regulation” approach to regulating stablecoins and other payment activities; and
   4. Continuing to explore the feasibility of adopting a U.K. Central Bank Digital Currency.

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