Apple Pay on an Apple Watch
The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed that digital wallets such as Apple Pay should be regulated, and currently lack safeguards.
“Today’s rule would crack down on one avenue for regulatory arbitrage,” CFPB director Rohit Chopra told Reuters, “by ensuring large technology firms and other nonbank payments companies are subjected to appropriate oversight.”
Chopra says that its proposal for regulation would apply to companies handling in excess of five million transactions a year. It’s not known how many transactions Apple Pay sees annually, but for 2022, the value of payments it processed was $6 trillion.
“Apple believes the proposed expansion… will increase regulatory burden without aa net public benefit, give rise to… regulatory error,” Apple said in October 2023, “and stifle the dynamic innovation that has characterised Australia’s payment system over recent years.”
