China Imposes More Supervision Over Payments Ecosystem

China’s Central Bank has penalized 1,436 banks and payment companies and levied fines totaling 1.13 billion yuan — or $176 million — since 2016, the bank’s deputy governor said at the recent China Payment and Clearing Forum.

As the website Pandaily reported on Monday (Oct. 11), Fan Yifei, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor, also noted that the bank has helped 22 payment institutions withdraw from the market voluntarily, refused to renew another 17 and revoked the business licenses of two more due to serious regulatory infractions.

China’s payment business license was established in 2010 and has spent the last 11 years scaling rapidly, to the point that the country now has the world’s leading non-bank payment market. But with that speed has come chaos, the Pandaily story noted — whether that means businesses conducting payment operations without permission or even outright illegal activity, from misappropriation of customers’ funds to money laundering.

Source: https://www.pymnts.com/news/international/2021/china-imposes-more-supervision-over-payments-ecosystem/