Latest Payments News: Mastercard To Restructure With Focus On Three Key Business Areas, and more

Catch up on six of the stories our payments compliance analysts have covered lately, and stay up-to-date on the latest news.

Mastercard To Restructure With Focus On Three Key Business Areas

Mastercard has announced new plans to realign its organisational structure in an effort to support strategic priorities and drive its “next era” of growth.

On May 1, the company will realign itself across three key areas: Core Payments, Commercial & New Payment Flows and Services.

Core Payments will focus on payments, products and platforms, including real-time payments and innovation in acceptance and consumer value propositions.

Commercial & New Payment Flows will focus on “data flows beyond consumer card payments”. This includes commercial cards, B2B accounts payables and receivables, non-carded bill payments, remittances, disbursements and healthcare solutions.

Services will integrate offerings from the company’s current Cyber & Intelligence, Data & Services and Open Banking teams.

The Services team will aim to be responsible for managing fraud, risk and cybersecurity controls, and growing through insights, analytics and loyalty programmes. It will also include a newly formed Data & AI organisation.

Hong Kong Extends Anti-Scam Charter

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has announced the expansion of the Anti-Scam Consumer Protection Charter, which brings additional institutions and merchants into scope.

This expanded charter (Charter 2.0) focuses on assisting the public in identifying credit card scams and other digital fraud and guarding against phishing messages purportedly sent by financial institutions and merchants.

"As the Charter expands to cover a wider range of aspects of people’s daily lives, we hope to enhance the public’s ability to guard against scams through a multi-pronged approach in conjunction with various anti-scam measures of the HKMA," said Eddie Yue, chief executive of the HKMA.

Participating institutions commit not to send any instant electronic messages to customers with embedded hyperlinks to acquire bank, credit card, investment, insurance and Mandatory Provident Fund accounts or other key personal information online.

They also commit to conveying anti-scam education messages.

CHIPS Network Successfully Migrates To ISO 20022

The CHIPS network in the US, the largest private-sector high-value clearing and settlement system in the world, has successfully migrated to the ISO 20022 messaging format.

The migration took place on Monday (April 8), with CHIPS releasing 555,345 payments with a total value of $1.81trn on its first day of operations.

The Clearing House, operator of CHIPS, said that widespread adoption of the ISO 20022 will enhance payments processing efficiency by allowing participants to send more structured data with each transaction.

As covered by Vixio, ISO 20022 allows transactions to be sent with up to 9,000 characters of additional information, including “rich data tags” such as ultimate debtor, ultimate creditor and payment purpose.

“ISO 20022 is the foundation for financial institutions to work smarter and faster, leading to greater operational efficiency, improved data analytics and compliance, new opportunities for innovation and enhanced customer experience,” said Pat Antonacci, chief customer experience officer at Swift.

“The Clearing House’s successful migration is a significant step towards the US realising these possibilities.”

Spain Consults On Incoming Digitalisation Regulation

The Spanish government has launched a public consultation on a preliminary draft law and draft royal decree on the digitalisation and modernisation of the financial sector.

The consultation's aims include the transposition of EU directives including the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation.

The consultation also looks at proposed rules to address various national initiatives such as financial digitisation, relating to the digital operational resilience of the Spanish payment system and the financial sandbox in Spain, among other things.

The consultation closes on April 30 and seeks feedback on the problems that these initiatives solve, the timings of their adoption, the objectives of the regulations and possible alternative solutions.

Paytm Payments Bank CEO Resigns Amid Compliance Issues

The CEO of Paytm Payments Bank Ltd has resigned as the firm continues its break-up from parent company One 97 Communications Ltd (OCL).

In a statement submitted to the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), OCL said that Surinder Chawla, CEO and managing director of Paytm Bank, tendered his resignation on Monday (April 8).

The statement went on to say that Chawla had chosen to leave the company due to “personal reasons” and to “explore better career prospects”.

On March 1, 2024, OCL announced that almost all agreements between itself and Paytm Bank have been “terminated”.

Since January this year, when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) ordered a shutdown of Paytm Bank due to “persistent non-compliance”, the OCL banking arm has been in a state of limbo.

However, it did manage to retain access to the UPI instant payments system for its customers via a new third-party application provider (TPAP) permission.

Mastercard, Singapore Central Bank Sign New Cybersecurity MoU

The Monetary Authority of Singapore and Mastercard have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to enhance cooperation in cybersecurity.

The partnership aims to further cement the collaboration between MAS and Mastercard in bilateral information sharing of cyber threat intelligence to raise situational awareness in the financial services sector.

“With a constantly evolving cyber threat landscape and rapid digitalisation of financial services globally, a close public-private partnership between key financial sector players is essential to engendering cyber resilience of the financial ecosystem," said Vincent Loy, assistant director of the MAS.

"I am glad that this MoU between MAS and Mastercard will contribute towards this outcome and help advance cybersecurity capacity building.”

The bilateral agreement will focus on joint analysis of the latest cyber threats affecting the financial services sector, to produce actionable insights and recommendations on possible countermeasures.

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