Common approach and logic for mapping the regulatory landscape of payment services

Web Payment Interest Group - Regulatory Issues Task Force

A common approach for mapping the regulatory landscape of payment services

Rules and regulations are intended to determine mandatory requirements established and requested by local regulations, inside a geographical area known as a "jurisdiction".

In many cases, disrespect of such requirements may hinder or prevent payment services to be provided inside this specific juridiction. These regulations are thus able to shape the scope and extension of a specific payment instrument or solution depending on its level of compliance with the local major rules.

In order to maximize the scope of acceptation of the standards promoted by the W3C, it makes sense to seek to be as compliant as possible with major requirements, in as many countries as possible. To be able to do so, we need to gather basic information about the regulatory landscape in major geographical areas.

 > This requires to be able to start from a rough inventory of the major regulatory 
 >  rules to be taken into consideration for each jurisdiction: the regulatory landscapes.

The limit of such a "local" approach is the risk of spliting up the vision, due to the lack of coherence between the different regulatory logics across juridictions. It should be most useful to be able to define a coherent and comprehensive list of questions to be checked, in each jurisdiction, such as : what is the scope of regulation for payment services in this juridiction? does it exist specific limits or limitations for electronic payments? what are the AML requirements? does it exist specific rules for data protection to comply with for payment services? for consumer's protection? for merchant's information? etc.

 > It rises the need for a common global screening approach of the main requirements 
 >  to integrate: aka a single basic check list of such principal issues 

The larger acceptance in major juridictions is an ambitious goal. Success will be difficult to ensure but it is most likely that it won't be reached without a basic vision about the major regulatory issues in all of the main jurisdictions. If a common "check list" may be designed, gathering the principal requirements, limits and rules to comply with, it should be very helpful in order to be able to provide a list of relevant key points, for each major jurisdiction. Such an inventory should provide useful points of reference and could help to avoid major mistakes.

 > cross-checking this list with the "regulatory landscape" shall provide a useful 
 > set of references about how each key-point is (or isn't) regulated for each jurisdiction 
 > screened.

Through these three steps, the task force may be able to build a common, extensive and coherent vision, about how to deal with the major regulatory issues and how to maximize the global acceptance of the standard.
The map below presents the suggested approach