The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | June 20th

By Gaia Lamperti

The Monday Roundup sets the scene for the week’s biggest news stories, industry deals, and upcoming events. For Prime subscribers only.

Greening up

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has issued new guidelines to help financial regulators across the world assess climate risk and evaluate banks’ preparedness. The set of 18 principles covers corporate governance, internal controls, risk assessment, management and reporting. They were designed to be adapted to a diverse range of banking systems depending on the size, complexity and risk profile of the bank or banking sector. The paper will be implemented “as soon as possible and will monitor progress across member jurisdictions to promote a common understanding of supervisory expectations and support the development and harmonisation of strong practices across jurisdictions,” as the Basel Committee said in a statement.

News from Mastercard

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has lifted the business restrictions it had imposed on Mastercard APAC in July 2021, allowing it to resume card issuance in the country. The restrictions were preventing the payments giant from onboarding new domestic customers onto its card network, for not complying with its 2018 circular on storing payment systems data in India. “In view of the satisfactory compliance demonstrated by Mastercard,” RBI says, “the restrictions imposed, vide order dated July 14, 2021, on on-boarding of new domestic customers have been lifted with immediate effect.”

Mastercard announced that it will expand its payment networks to NFTs, after partnering up with a number of leading NFT marketplaces to allow 2.9 billion cardholders to directly make NFT purchases without buying crypto first. Cardholders can now bypass the process of buying and transferring crypto to NFT marketplaces.  “These integrations are designed to make crypto more accessible and help the NFT ecosystem keep growing, innovating and bringing in more fans,” the firm said.

Where is the buzz

Just four months after reaching the milestone of 5 million open banking users, the UK has hit a new record of 6 million users, as OBIE‘s Head of Stakeholder Engagement Constanza Castro Feijóo revealed at a conference last week. The industry has moved from 2 million users to the new record in less than 2 years. In the last month alone, 5 million open banking payments were made, and open banking payments have grown at a rate of 500% year-over-year.