Law and Regulation

Consumers with subprime or deep subprime credit scores accounted for the majority of buy now, pay later originations from 2021 to 2022, a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finds. Within those two subsets, 45% of BNPL loans during that period were taken out by consumers with deep subprime …

Opponents of the proposed Credit Card Competition Act expect the bill will be reintroduced in Congress, so the Electronic Payments Coalition launched a pre-emptive strike late Wednesday with a report detailing the bill’s potential economic impact. The study, conducted by Oxford Economics Research, claims the CCCA’s impact on the U.S. …

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Thursday U.S. open-banking standards will be developed under the aegis of Financial Data Exchange Inc., a standards-setting body. The CFPB recognized FDX as the standard-setting body under the bureau’s Personal Financial Data Rights rule. The final version of that rule was released in October, …

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued credit reporting agency Experian over claims it unlawfully failed to properly investigate consumer disputes. In a statement, Experian says the lawsuit is without merit. “It is contrary to longstanding regulatory and judicial precedent and is another example of irresponsible overreach by the CFPB. Our legal position …

The Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. has published a standard, “QR Code Protection Using Cryptographic Solutions, X9.148,” laying out how to create secure QR codes. Nuvei Corp. announced it will provide payments processing in a partnership with GIG, a technology company specializing in the iGaming business. Paysafe Ltd. has won approval from the …

An Asian-American businesswoman named Nisha Desai has sued PayPal Holdings Inc. on grounds of racial discrimination, alleging the company restricted some of a $535-million investment commitment to Black and Hispanic candidates. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, asks for unspecified damages and an order …

The Internal Revenue Service will begin requiring peer-to-peer payment apps in 2025 to issue 1099-K statements to self-employed workers who received more than $5,000 in payments through those apps in 2024. The new requirement, which is being implemented after a two-year delay, applies to such P2P apps as PayPal, Venmo, …

Meta Platform’s WhatsApp payments service has been permitted by the National Payments Corp. of India, a regulatory body, to roll out WhatsApp Pay to its entire user base of 500 million in that country. Meta formerly was known as Facebook. GasBuddy, which offers a payments card featuring discounts on gasoline, forecasts the …

The FinCEN Beneficial Ownership Information mandate is back in force with a recent court decision. That rule, part of the Corporate Transparency Act passed in 2024,had required businesses to file a Beneficial Ownership Information report by Jan. 1, which was delayed earlier in December but now makes these reports due Jan. 13. Businesses formed …

The Merchants Payments Coalition fired back late Monday at a request last week from the American Bankers Association that the Federal Reserve not act on a proposal to lower a longstanding limit on the interchange banks can earn on debit card transactions.  In a letter to the Fed, the MPC …