The Payment Services Regulator (PSR) has published its response to the PSR Panel’s Digital Payments Initiative report. In response to last year’s Access to Cash Working Group’s recommendations, Dr Ruth Wandhöfer, the PSR Panel Chair was tasked with seeking to understand potential barriers to the take-up of digital payments and to identify potential solutions.
Following a stakeholder workshop, the PSR has now responded to each of the recommendations. In its responses the PSR reiterates its commitment to:
- ensuring competition between different forms of payment system and that there is sufficient consistency (for example in terminology) to enable consumers and merchants to make meaningful comparisons;
- supporting the growth of open banking by helping to develop the regulatory framework required to under pin it;
- actively encourage industry to address digital exclusion;
- seeking solutions that would enable the utilisation of open banking at point of sale;
- bringing direct debits ‘into the digital age’;
- encouraging industry to properly tackle fraud; and
- feeding into the work being undertaken by FCA and the Government on ‘digital identities’.