The past two decades have seen the broadening of access in the payment services industry to entities other than banks, most notably payment institutions (PIs) and electronic money institutions (EMIs). In the EEA, the number of PIs and EMIs licensed as of December 2023 stands at 883 and 342, respectively, according to the EUCLID database. When speaking about PSP licenses in the UK, the analogue figures are 407 and 232, according to the FCA Register. In this article, we explore these two datasets in detail to give a historical and country-by-country overview of the number of EMI and PI licenses ..read more

In today’s ever-evolving regulatory landscape, payment and e-money firms must be equipped with effective anti-money laundering (AML) procedures to mitigate the risk of financial crime. Conducting thorough risk assessments is a crucial component of any institution’s AML compliance program. In this article, we will walk you through the process of conducting an AML risk assessment from start to finish. We will outline the key steps involved, provide practical tips, and offer you the ultimate AML risk assessment template that you can tailor for your firm. We, at PSP Lab, aim to simplify complex co ..read more

In this article, we make the case that the current macroeconomic environment is more beneficial for the banking sector (compared to, say, the environment of the preceding 5 years), and that banking entrepreneurs should recognise this as a window of opportunity and apply for a banking license. The time has come to turn your banking dreams into reality and take the decision to get a banking license! We will concisely outline why that is the case while discussing key metrics and the driving forces behind them. Inflation, interest rates and bond yields in 2022-2023 2022 was a bumpy year for intere ..read more

Embedded finance is a trend that is starting to catch on. More and more companies from this industry are getting funding, and more use cases are created. That is why we have recently published the article What Is Embedded Finance? 5 Eye-opening Reasons Why You Should Know. After requests from our readers, we have decided to write this follow-up article. Today, we want to discuss with you embedded finance sectors, specific embedded finance companies, and embedded finance use cases. This article is written for readers from both financial and non-financial companies to change the readers’ perspec ..read more

Wider adoption of FinTech and growth of the payments sector has offered convenience and a variety of choices for the payment service users. Nevertheless, innovation is almost always accompanied by the emergence of novel risks that are not appropriately accounted for from the onset. One of such risks, which was recently identified, is the insolvency of payment institutions (PIs) and e-money institutions (EMIs) and corresponding effects on their customers. There is evidence that the previously existing insolvency process for PIs/EMIs is not ideal for the customers. Some of the recent administrat ..read more

Following the fallouts of the financial service firms where the customers were misled, mistreated, or may have even lost their hard-earned money, the FCA decided to introduce a new consumer duty and we decided to prepare this consumer duty summary for you. The FCA consumer duty rules are already finalised and will come into force on the 31st of July 2023 for new and existing products and services and those that are open for renewal. Starting from the 31st of July 2024 it will also apply to those products that are not on the market anymore i.e. those that are closed but were acquired by the cus ..read more

From 31 March 2022, companies with UK Electronic Money License, Small Electronic Money Institutions, UK Payment Institutions, Small Payment Institutions, Payment Initiation Service Providers (PISPs) and Account Information Service Providers (AISPs), banks, investment firms, insurers, building societies are subject to FCA Operational Resilience Framework requirements, which are written in the new chapter of SYSC 15.A. Existing firms must choose impact tolerance levels applicable to failures of essential business services (see Step 3 that explain what impact tolerance level is) before 31 March 2 ..read more

Before I explain in detail how crypto anti-money laundering works, I want to elaborate more on why you should care about money laundering through crypto and read this article. When I speak with compliance “experts” in the crypto industry, they are quick to point out that I am wasting time right now advocating for crypto anti-money laundering. I was surprised that even high-level employees from well-known big firms claim that money laundering in crypto is not an issue since, by current estimates, the use of cryptocurrencies for money laundering accounted for just 0.05% of all cryptocurrency tra ..read more

It is not a secret that criminals are always looking for new ways how to “clean” the dirty money- cryptocurrency is not an exception and there is a high risk of cryptocurrency money laundering. As a novel type of value transfer, it prominently rose to be used for criminality. Nevertheless, those were the days of Silk Road when there was literally zero regulation, and no obligations were imposed on virtual asset service providers (a.k.a. VASPs- even the term itself did not exist). Fast forward to 2022, we already have FATF Recommendations, AMLD5 (now the 6th, but it was the 5th which placed cry ..read more

The FinTech market is booming and more and more “core banking software” solutions (or “core banking system”, whichever name you prefer) are available for new FinTech start-ups. People are overwhelmed with the choice and therefore I receive dozens of calls and emails every month from clients, our website visitors, former colleagues, and my LinkedIn contacts from the payments service industry asking me “Dmitrijus, what is the best core banking software for my FinTech?” To save my time I decided to write the most comprehensive guide on this topic that you can find online based on my 20+ years of ..read more