On 15 July 2024, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) published a call for information on the benefits and risks that digital wallets bring to people and businesses.
The FCA and PSR highlight that digital wallets have become one of the most significant ways in which big technology firms are playing an important role in the payments landscape. The regulators have therefore launched the call for information to help them to better understand the impact on UK consumers and businesses of this increasing popularity of digital wallets.
The regulators are seeking focused information and evidence relating to:
- The range of benefits that digital wallets bring for service users.
- Whether there are any features that result in payments not working as well as they could for consumers and/or businesses.
- Their role in unlocking the potential of account-to-account payments and how they could impact competition between payment systems.
- Whether digital wallets could raise any significant competition, consumer protection or market integrity issues, either now or in the future.
The call for information builds on the PSR’s previous work on contactless mobile payments and the FCA’s work on big tech activity in financial services.
Next steps
The deadline for responses to the call for information is 13 September 2024 at 5pm. The FCA and PSR flag that they are interested in hearing from stakeholders across the payments and wider financial services landscape, including digital wallet and technology providers as well as their service users and other parties with an interest in digital wallets.
The regulators intend to consider all feedback and provide an update by Q1 2025.