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Permitting Visa and Mastercard to challenge the Competition Appeal Tribunal’s (CAT) previous ruling returns the UK payments sector to legal volatility, leaving the cost of card acceptance an unsettled question as regulators promote alternatives.

The Trump administration’s vision for cybersecurity signals its priorities, which include working closely with the private sector to identify fraud networks and suspicious financial flows, but stakeholders must wait to learn of any new obligations.

The ninth edition of the UK’s Regulatory Initiatives Grid, published in December 2025, sets out the country’s financial services regulatory agenda for the next two years. In this piece, Vixio examines what the regulators have outlined in the banking, credit and lending section of the latest grid, explains the likely impact of developments on financial institutions and suggests what the regulators’ stated priorities tell us about the direction of travel in the UK.

The country still lacks a regulatory framework for digital assets, creating a significant challenge for Polish crypto firms, which may be forced to suspend operations or rapidly migrate to other EU jurisdictions to maintain market access.

Subscription-based business models have become a defining feature of digital commerce, prompting increased regulatory scrutiny of recurring payment practices. As recurring billing has expanded across sectors, including media, fintechs, and retail memberships, regulators are increasingly focused on consumer protection issues such as transparency of pricing and renewal terms, informed consumer consent, ease of cancellation, and prevention of so-called “subscription traps”.

The plan aims to modernise the country’s response to the evolving threat via a more coordinated and technologically enabled prevention model based on improved analytical capabilities, stronger governance and deeper collaboration with industry.

Participants identified several foundational questions for the UK cryptoasset framework, including areas of regulatory treatment and infrastructure design that must be addressed for stablecoins to operate at scale as payment instruments.

South Korea’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit (KoFIU) are advancing a targeted set of reforms to the country’s anti-money laundering framework following a review of the Act on Reporting and Using Specified Financial Transaction Information. Rather than overhauling the system, authorities aim to close operational gaps identified through supervision, particularly as digital asset markets expand and process growing volumes of bank-linked transactions. The reforms focus on improving transaction transparency, strengthening investigative tools and clarifying reporting obligations as South Korea prepares for its next Financial Action Task Force mutual evaluation in 2028.

In February 2026, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published policy statement PS26/1, setting out the final regulatory framework for deferred payment credit (DPC) (also known broadly as buy now, pay later (BNPL) lending), following consultation under CP25/23. The policy statement confirms the FCA’s approach to bringing previously unregulated short-term, interest-free instalment credit within the formal consumer credit perimeter. The final rules reflect industry feedback and clarify how DPC products will be integrated into the FCA Handbook and aligned with existing conduct, creditworthiness and Consumer Duty requirements. The reforms were introduced after the FCA acknowledged that most BNPL activity has been operating outside its direct supervision and beyond the full scope of the Consumer Credit Act 1974. The core challenge for BNPL providers now lies in reconciling their traditionally frictionless, embedded checkout model with a more rigorous compliance architecture. Under the finalised rules, BNPL providers will have to redesign credit decisioning processes and update technology infrastructure. If implemented strategically rather than reactively, the new rules can

The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) has long been the cornerstone of the United States’ federal anti-money laundering (AML) framework. However, for many financial institutions and compliance professionals, the law has become a symbol of regulatory stagnation.