European Union

European financial institutions and central banks, along with critical European banking and payments infrastructure providers, face an increasing onslaught from hackers that has prompted two major responses from the EU.

It's a race to the finish line that also affects U.S. companies with European customers. In these final moments, every company must at least show good faith in attempting to follow the law and having procedures and technology in place to do so.

Many in Europe and the U.S. view GDPR as Europe's first true data breach protection measure — in part because it requires notification of any breach within 72 hours. But they also see it as a complex and costly race to the May 25 deadline.

TransferWise is the first nonbank to become a member of the U.K.’s Faster Payments service (FPS), but with Brexit on the horizon, it has to make sure it is similarly invested in other markets.

Despite its popularity — or perhaps because of it — the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has been at the front lines of many of the issues plaguing the cryptocurrency market. Its new e-money license in the U.K. could go a long way to easing some of those pains.

So far, U.K. fintechs' options range from relocating to other countries to finding ways to offset negative effects by attempting to “Brexit-proof” their businesses. The latter option can still be a substantial undertaking.

Under GDPR, nothing can happen with the European consumer's data unless they explicitly opt in. American consumers tend to ignore the fine print on company statements regarding the potential uses of their data, leading to an environment where companies expect them to opt in by default.

Even if a business is located in the U.S., it’s where the service is delivered that determines if the GDPR rules governing data protection in the EU apply, writes Mia Papanicolaou of Striata.

It's not just big banks. Even U.S. community banks may be subject to the General Data Protection Regulation given the boundlessness of digital commerce.

By replacing human judgment with other identity technologies, higher levels of verification accuracy can be achieved in a fraction of the time, writes Romana Sachová, co-chair of the Security and Biometrics Workgroup at Mobey Forum.

The latest draft of EU securitization rules would ban securitization of loans where borrowers certified their own income, raising concerns about banks’ ability to unload roughly $1 trillion of nonperformers.

The European directive is an opportunity for U.S. institutions to update data protection, writes Seth Ruden, senior fraud consultant for ACI Worldwide.

Under PSD2, banks are expected to admit all vetted comers, but how they will connect to them is up to the individual parties, writes Raz Rafaeli, CEO of Secret Double Octopus.

One of the critical unanswered questions early in the Single Euro Payments Area process and the new Payment Services Directive in Europe was whether banks would pony up for needed technology upgrades.

Banks may need to find $30 billion to $50 billion of additional capital to support new European units in the aftermath of a hard Brexit, and some smaller firms may abandon their operations on the Continent altogether as profitability plunges, according to Oliver Wyman Inc.

Bank of America has picked Dublin to locate its main European Union hub in preparation for Britain quitting the bloc in 2019.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said European Union officials could force London-based firms to move substantially more employees abroad than planned if they demand additional banking operations be performed inside the bloc.

Interviews with entrepreneurs and techies at the Copenhagen conference.

The central bank said the legal change would allow it to fully exercise the powers laid out in a clearing proposal from the European Commission.

By the end of last year, the number of EMV chip cards in global circulation had increased by 1.3 billion from 2015 to a total of 6.1 billion, according to EMV standards body EMVCo.