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Tuesday 23 September 2014

Feedback on FCA Project Innovate Workshops

The Financial Conduct Authority has published its summary of the feedback it received in relation to its proposals to support innovation in financial services ("Project Innovate").

A striking aspect is the negative, limited view of innovation from established, regulated firms, compared to small innovators and non-regulated firms. This seems to underscore how protected the existing providers have been from external competition to date.

Worth providing feedback on the summary, and any solutions to problems identified.

Following the Financial Innovation Lab session in May and the Project Innovate session I attended in August, I still recommend a short 'small firms registration process' that would allow all new firms to enter the market more quickly and operate under certain thresholds before going through the lengthy full authorisation process if they can succeed in growing (as for small payment/e-money institutions).

Saturday 20 September 2014

PSD2, The Saga Continues - Updated

The European Council issued its revised proposal for PSD2in September 2014.

The Society for Computers and Law has kindly published an update to my earlier article on PSD2 to reflect the revised proposal.

Possibly the key issues relate to:
  • limiting the technology service providers exemption to those who supply their services to payment service providers, rather than users - for example, this would no longer seem to apply to 'gateway' data services supplied to merchants/retailers, as opposed to acquirers;
  • the distinctions between technology services, on the one hand, and services involving payment initiation, account access, bill payment and acquiring;
  • the inconsistent treatment of bill payment services, e-commerce marketplaces and the suppliers of public communications networks (telcos);
  • the notification requirements for large store card, gift card and loyalty programmes and other 'limited network' payment schemes;
  • the requirement for payment service providers to release to payers the names of payees who refuse to surrender funds that have been paid to them by mistake;
  • host state reporting for cross-border service providers, in addition to home state reporting;
  • prescriptive security provisions affecting different types of payment service provider, which must meet (as yet unpublished) standards issued by the European Banking Authority;
  • e-money institutions having to provide fresh evidence that they meet the threshold conditions for authorisation.
Interested in hearing your thoughts, either here or via the SCL site.

 

Thursday 18 September 2014

The Role of Consumer Contracts, Advice and Disclosure

Great discussion at a CSFI event this morning, focusing on the difference between financial advice and guidance, and touching on the FCA's very encouraging plans to support a far better consumer experience and more innovation generally. A key theme in the discussion centred on the role of consumer contracts in the supply of financial services, and it was clear there needs to be more discussion on the tension between regulation, contracts and product information. 

Of course, the starting point was that lengthy consumer contracts are 'silly' - a point made by John Kay last year and discussed on the SCL blog. But it's important to recognise that contracts act as a layer between law and regulation and the information a consumer sees when buying and using a financial service. They represent a service provider's public statement of how it interprets the law and regulation to apply to its service. That statement is critical not only for consumers themselves, but also for the courts and many stakeholders on whom consumers rely to protect them (indeed governments have even deputised global service providers as private sheriffs, relying on violations of their terms of service to 'shut down' Wikileaks, for example). In addition, financial instruments - loans, bonds, shares - that are agreed or traded in the course of using most financial services are themselves simply sets of terms and conditions.

The reason consumers are confronted by such terms and conditions is that the courts have insisted that consumers must be given an opportunity to read and agree them if they are to govern the customer relationship. It is this interactive process of offer and acceptance that produces an enforceable "contract" (along with some form of 'consideration'). Unless and until Parliament changes the basis for establishing contract law in the UK, we're stuck with that approach. 

Yet this morning it was suggested that a consumer should not even need to the opportunity to read and agree terms and conditions in order to benefit from them. Revolutionary stuff, unless you live on the continent, where a lot more of what we see as contractual terms are embedded in civil codes. This of course removes a lot of commercial flexibility, and means the market moves at the speed of law and regulation... which would undermine the FCA's object of promoting innovation.

Of course, the financial services sector is arriving late to the debate about how to enable consumers to properly agree and understand the substance of a contract without necessarily drilling into the fine print unless they so wish. The intellectual property community came up with the Creative Commons licensing model in 2001 and, more recently, the World Economic Forum has been trying to foster a similar approach to the use of personal data.

But the critical issue in every case is whether the simplified summaries that consumers see and agree actually reflect the terms and conditions on which a firm says it is doing business; whether those terms and conditions are consistent with applicable law and regulation; and, finally, whether the firm's business processes and computers actually operate on the same basis. Here we run into the tension between Big Data and the growing array of technology that puts you in control of Your Data - data about you, or which you generate in the course of your activities.

This is certainly not an area where the FCA can go it alone, and it's great to see their representatives (not to mention someone from the Treasury) participating in open debates such as the one this morning. 


Tuesday 9 September 2014

Consultation On New Mortgage Rules

The UK Treasury is now consulting over the rules required to implement the European Mortgage Credit Directive by March 2016.

Importantly, the proposed rules will regulate second charge mortgages (also known as second charge loans, secured loans or secured personal loans) into line with first charge mortgage lending; and introduce a new set of regulations for buy-to-let lending, where the lending is to consumers rather than for business purposes. This is not expected to affect the vast majority of buy-to-let lending which is done for business purposes and therefore not subject to the European directive.

The consultation is open until early November 2014.