At Adam Atlas Attorneys at Law we are thankful to our clients for engaging us for legal advice in support of their visionary ideas. 1. Digital Payments Explosion. With Covid rendering cash dirtier than usual (‘lol’) nearly everyone in electronic payments is breaking records, including Amazon, Shopify, Paypal, Adyen and Square. Rapid migration from f2f to online sales has created a lot of activity for new and existing payfacs, ISOs and other payment processors. 2. Wirecard. Other than producing one of the top three payments videos of all time (the other two being about lawyers who help launder money and the unforgettable and classic bitconnect video), the Wirecard fiasco has given all investors and payments companies alike a stiff reminder that they too must answer to reality. It has also created opportunities for investors to pick up some …
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Competition in Payments Our recent post to LinkedIn of the US Payments Family Tree generated record feedback. There is thirst for a above-the-tree-line view on who is who the payments landscape. Once upon a time, everyone read the Nilson Report that amazingly published regular figures on the volume of processing at each US acquirer. Divining competitors is not that easy anymore. Here are a few reasons why the competitive landscape is more complex and interesting: 1. ‘Big hat, no cattle’ processors. With bountiful capital (2017 fintech investments $31 billion, 2018 $39.6 billion and the first half of 2019, $27.9 billion), fintech startups have had the luxury of being unprofitable. Square and Stripe exemplify fintechs for which profit is a difficult question. Possibly profitless market-leaders like Uber, Airbnb and WeWork had investors …
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For better or for worse, centralized control of value (and values 😉 is eroding. It takes less than an hour to launch a crypto currency. For example, there are a million Adam Atlas Coin in existence. (They have no value and are not for sale.) As a defensive measure, the established players are circling the wagons (or should I say, building centralized ledgers) into various controlling portions of the market. Taken together, the market looks like it’s admitting defeat to decentralized exchanges of value (i.e. virtual currency) and attempting to extract one last round of return before a more complete paradigm shift. Single Suppler for Credit Card Processing? There now exists a …
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Links to just about everything in fintech We have advised hundreds of clients across almost all business models new and old. This site is not legal advice; it is information only. You should obtain qualified legal advice prior to operating any money services business (MSB) or virtual currency business (VCB). In addition to compliance information, we also want to jog your payments innovation creativity through our www.paymentsbusinessideas.com site. We are proud to lead the preeminent open-source payments law practice where sharing information related to payments regulation is one of our core principles. By way of example, here is what we learned at the most recent Emerging Payments conference in Washington, D.C. The Atlas Payments …
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1. Can a money transmitter license be rented? No. Licensed MSBs, such as money transmitters are licensed based on their specific business model, financial position, AML procedures and overall compliance profile. Some licensed money transmitters will, however, appoint authorised delegates or agents that assist in operating their licensed business. Here are money transmitters licensed in New York and California. 2. Can and ISO Aggregate? Sort of. In the old days, ISOs had to treat merchants as stand-alone entities, each getting their own unique merchant account. The new Payment Services Provider (PSP) concept has allowed ISOs to step into the shoes of acquiring banks and actually create sub-merchants and MIDs for each of …
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1. Fintech and Crypto Law Fintech law is critical at the ideation, implementation and growth periods of every payments business. Simple advice on a business model can mean the difference between a path to growth or regulatory purgatory. By way of example, our firm assisted in clarifying perhaps the most important question of the decade under U.S. law: is an ISO or payment processor a money services business (MSB) under the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act? When done right, it is not, as determined by FinCEN in 2014. Our firm has also led in creating new rules related to the governance of crypto, including, for example, FinCEN’s guidance on virtual currency trading …
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