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By Andrew C. Moyle, Grace Erskine, and Charlotte Collins

As leading global financial and FinTech centres, the UK and Singapore will benefit from strengthening their cybersecurity alliance.

On 13 June 2019, the Bank of England, the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore announced that they will be working together to strengthen cybersecurity in their countries’ financial sectors.

The regulators have characterised the aims of this new collaboration as “identifying effective ways to share information and exploring potential for staff exchanges”.

All three regulators have identified cybercrime as an increasing global problem. Speaking about the new initiative, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, said, “The average cost of cybercrime for financial services companies globally has increased by more than 40% over the past three years. Cyber risk is not constrained by geographic boundaries, making international cooperation essential to address this growing threat”.

Report highlights key strengths and regulatory innovations to inform stakeholders for trade and investment.

By Laura Holden and Nootan Vegad

The Department for International Trade, with the support of Innovate Finance, has published a report titled the “FinTech State of the Nation”. Providing an overview of the UK’s FinTech industry and highlighting the UK’s appeal as a FinTech destination for entrepreneurs and investors, the report seeks to demonstrate how the UK’s FinTech sector has emerged as a global leader and why this will continue in the future.

The report describes the actions that the government, regulators, and industry have taken to stimulate and sustain growth of the UK’s FinTech sector. The report includes an overview of technology demand, a regional analysis of FinTech, details of the investment environment, views from the FCA, a summary of the talent, skills, and diversity in the industry and the “Essential Eight” technology trends — which includes block chain, drones, and artificial intelligence to name a few.

As several PSD2 deadlines approach, PSPs must comply with reporting and notification requirements, as well as with their GDPR obligations.

By Christian F. McDermott, Fiona M. Maclean, and Jagveen Tyndall

Though the majority of the provisions relating to the revised EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2) came into force in the UK on 13 January 2018, the regulatory technical standards (RTS) and strong customer authentication measures (SCA) will come into force on 14 September 2019. The FCA has issued a helpful reminder setting out some important deadlines that payment service providers (PSPs) must meet to be compliant.

Application Programme Interfaces

PSD2 allows third party providers (TPPs) to build payment service infrastructures upon the existing platforms of financial institutions; such institutions must provide TPPs with access to client account information via open application programme interfaces (APIs). Financial institutions seeking to enable such access can do so by either constructing dedicated interfaces built on these APIs or through adjusting existing customer interfaces. In both instances, such interfaces and their accompanying customer authentication measures must be in place by 14 September 2019.

UK publishes White Paper with hard-hitting regulatory proposals to tackle online harms.

By Alain Traill, Stuart Davis, Andrew Moyle, Deborah Kirk and Gail Crawford

On 8 April 2019, the Home Office and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) published an “Online Harms White Paper”, proposing a new compliance and enforcement regime intended to combat online harms. The regime is designed to force online platforms to move away from self-regulation and sets out a legal framework to tackle users’ illegal and socially harmful activity. Although the regime appears to target larger social media platforms, the proposals technically extend to all organisations that provide online platforms allowing user interaction or user-generated content (not limited to social media companies or even ‘service providers’ in the traditional sense) and set out a potentially onerous and punitive compliance and enforcement regime for a broad set of online providers.