Global Regulator & Central Bank News Roundup

The Reserve Bank of Australia has published the Conclusions Paper setting out the Payments System Board’s final decisions from its Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging, alongside variations to the Bank’s retail payments Standards. The package aims to remove card surcharging on designated networks, lower interchange fee caps (including for foreign-issued cards), and require more disclosure of card payment fees to improve competition and reduce merchants’ card acceptance costs. Surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa debit, prepaid and credit cards is set to end from 1 October 2026, implemented by lifting the current prohibition on ‘no-surcharge’ rules so designated networks can impose them. The Bank estimates consumers currently pay around AUD 1.6 billion of the AUD 1.8 billion in annual surcharges on designated networks. On fees, the Board decided to lower interchange caps for domestic-issued transactions (particularly consumer credit cards), retain the existing cap for domestic-issued commercial credit cards, introduce a cap for foreign-issued transactions acquired in Australia, and update the net compensation framework to reflect practice and prevent circumvention. The interchange changes are expected to lower wholesale card payment costs for merchants by around AUD 910 million per year. On transparency, designated networks and large acquirers will be required to publish fee information, merchants will receive standardised statement information, and acquirers will have to publish merchant service fees and a measure of interchange pass-through, with the Bank planning additional monitoring to highlight firms that do not pass through savings. Most reforms take effect on 1 October 2026, with the interchange cap on foreign-issued cards and some transparency measures commencing later on 1 April 2027 to allow more implementation time. The Bank also plans to begin a separate public consultation in mid-2026 on potential regulation of retail payments areas outside this review, including mobile wallets, three-party card networks such as American Express, buy-now pay-later services and e-commerce platforms.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has published the ASX Inquiry Panel’s Final Report into the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) group, following a nine-month review of governance, capability, and risk management frameworks and practices. The report builds on the Interim Report with additional supporting detail and case studies. The Panel’s findings remain consistent with the Interim Report, including that the resilience of critical market infrastructure has been compromised in pursuit of high shareholder returns, governance has not maintained sufficient focus on critical market infrastructure, ASX has not effectively acted as a steward of that infrastructure, and capability and cultural barriers are impeding transformational change. Additional observations include the need for more mature, embedded risk management and compliance practices, and a need for further reflection on how ASX executes its market supervision responsibilities under the Operating and Listing Rules framework. In response to the findings, ASX submitted a Commitments Plan to ASIC on 27 February 2026 covering delivery of the strategic package of reforms, including a reset of its Accelerate program by 30 June 2026, development of a revised technology strategy aligned to a refreshed business strategy, and implementation of a AUD 150 million net tangible assets capital charge by 30 June 2027, to be held until agreed work is completed to ASIC’s satisfaction. ASIC also noted governance changes to the Clearing and Settlement facility boards, which are now comprised solely of independent directors following February 2026 resignations, and ongoing work on further appointments and functional separation.

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has launched a framework enabling teenagers aged 13 to 18 to independently own and operate bank accounts and digital wallets. The initiative is intended to promote secure saving, confident transactions and responsible financial habits, while giving young people an early entry point into the formal financial system and supporting their participation in an increasingly digital economy. SBP said the framework addresses a gap in Pakistan’s financial landscape, where overall adult account ownership has risen to 67 percent but teenagers have largely remained limited to joint or parent-controlled accounts; with around 26 million Pakistanis in the 13 to 18 age group, the initiative is aimed at fostering a financially literate and digitally capable generation. The framework forms part of the SBP's Strategic Plan 2023–28 and the National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2024–28, both of which prioritise youth inclusion.

At its most recent meeting, the General Board of the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) assessed that financial stability risks in the EU have increased following the escalation of the conflict in the Middle East. It pointed to sharp rises and volatility in oil and gas prices, a repricing in major bond markets partly reflecting higher short-term inflation expectations, and declines in key equity indices after record highs earlier in the year. It also noted that the risk of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure remains elevated amid heightened geopolitical tensions, while emphasising that the EU economy and financial system have so far shown broad resilience. Looking ahead, the ESRB warned that financial stability could be impaired through two routes. Via financial channels, a prolonged period of heightened conflict could prompt a sudden shift in markets’ expectations, triggering sharp and disorderly asset price corrections and further tightening financing conditions—effects that could be amplified by persistent fragilities in parts of the investment fund sector through forced asset sales, liquidity strains and procyclical behaviour. Via economic channels, sustained high energy prices and uncertainty could strain household and corporate balance sheets, especially in energy-intensive sectors, increasing credit risk in the medium term; rising borrowing costs and weaker economic activity could also exacerbate sovereign risks.

The European Central Bank’s Eurosystem has published a comprehensive payments strategy setting out how it intends to steer the evolution of European payments amid technological change, including tokenisation and distributed ledger technology. The strategy expands the Eurosystem’s retail payments focus to also cover wholesale, business-to-business and cross-border payments, while keeping central bank money as the anchor for settlement. The strategy is organised around four aims: maintaining the role of central bank money to support monetary policy effectiveness, financial stability and smooth payment system functioning, strengthening the robustness and strategic autonomy of European payments, fostering a more integrated and competitive payments ecosystem, and supporting the international role of the euro. Key actions include developing a European market for tokenised settlement assets with central bank money as the foundational settlement layer, complemented by EU-governed, euro-denominated, properly designed and regulated private settlement assets such as tokenised deposits and stablecoins. In wholesale payments, the Eurosystem will continue to invest in the T2 real-time gross settlement system and explore extending its operating hours, while developing DLT-compatible central bank money for wholesale settlement through the Pontes and Appia initiatives. For corporate payments, it points to greater standardisation, automation and process integration, including a more proactive role for the Euro Retail Payments Board, and continued investment in TIPS, which supports 24/7 settlement in central bank money. In retail payments, the strategy links resilience and autonomy goals to the digital euro and to EU-governed, pan-European market-led point-of-interaction solutions, and it notes the advancement of the European Payments Initiative’s Wero wallet. On timing, Pontes is intended to deliver a central bank money settlement solution by the end of the third quarter of 2026. The digital euro project is planned to be ready for issuance in 2029, subject to co-legislators adopting the Regulation on the establishment of the digital euro in 2026, with a pilot exercise and initial transactions potentially as soon as mid-2027. The Eurosystem will continue work to advance the G20 cross-border payments roadmap, including ongoing efforts to interlink TIPS with other fast payment systems, and will monitor developments and adapt the strategy as needed.

The Austrian National Bank (OeNB) has launched an interactive commercial real estate dashboard on its website, bringing together key data and analysis on the Austrian commercial real estate market in one publicly accessible, free-to-use tool, complementing its existing residential real estate dashboard. Part of OeNB’s financial market stability mandate, the dashboard is intended to improve transparency and support assessment of market developments given the close link between commercial real estate and Austrian banks’ loan portfolios. It is aimed at experts, banks, investors and the wider public and covers commercially used properties broadly, from commercially used residential buildings to office buildings and other commercial assets. The tool is organised into four sections - (1) Supply, (2) demand, (3) market (with price, transaction and vacancy information to be added from July 2026) and (4) mMacroprudential analysis (with granular data on commercial real estate loans, including volumes, rates, financing structures and loan quality) - and bundles approximately 50 indicators and more than 1,000 time series with breakdowns by asset class, region and credit characteristics.

The South African Financial Sector Conduct Authority has published a discussion paper for public consultation on environmental, social and governance (ESG) rating services and ESG data product providers, setting out its preliminary observations and key considerations for the South African market. The paper focuses on challenges around transparency, governance and conflicts of interest, and seeks views on how these activities should be treated from a policy and regulatory perspective. The discussion paper summarises the FSCA’s research and survey work on (i) how licensed credit rating agencies consider ESG in their credit rating processes and (ii) the practices of ESG rating and data providers operating in South Africa, including the use of proprietary and third-party data sources and common fee models (including subscription-based and issuer-pay). It also outlines perceived market shortcomings such as opaque methodologies and data sources, inconsistent outcomes across providers, reliance on self-reported corporate information, and concerns about conflicts of interest, and compares international approaches including formal supervisory regimes, code-based approaches and integration into existing credit ratings regulation. Stakeholders are asked, among other points, whether South Africa should pursue formal regulation, a voluntary code of conduct, or incorporation into existing regulatory frameworks, and whether IOSCO and OECD transparency-focused recommendations should form a baseline.

The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) has launched Project Tokenization under the CSA Collaboratory to build a shared understanding as well as examine the potential for and implications of tokenized financial products in capital markets and how they intersect with Canadian securities laws. The initiative is intended to support informed and coordinated regulatory responses to tokenization, with an initial phase focused on stakeholder engagement, issue mapping and targeted research to assess the opportunities and risks involved. Later phases could include a discussion paper or potentially live testing of tokenized financial instruments and related infrastructure within the CSA Collaboratory. The CSA is inviting a wide range of stakeholders, including fintechs, issuers, financial institutions, developers, transfer agents, custodians, marketplaces, clearing agencies and clearing houses, service providers, legal and accounting professionals, academics and others, to participate in workshops and complete a survey. Stakeholder input on use cases, priorities and challenges is intended to shape the CSA’s planning, future engagement and potential testing pathways. The first workshop will take place in Calgary, Alberta on Thursday, April 9, 2026, with workshops also planned in Toronto.

The Department of Finance Canada has launched consultations on Canada’s first whole-of-government National Anti-Fraud Strategy, intended to address fraud across its lifecycle from prevention through to harm mitigation. The consultation seeks feedback on three initial measures: supporting law enforcement’s ability to combat fraud, strengthening public awareness, and establishing a comprehensive Multi-Sector Anti-Fraud Framework that could introduce new and enhanced obligations for federally regulated financial institutions, telecommunications service providers, and digital platforms. Under the proposed Framework, regulated organizations could face general and sector-specific market-conduct requirements across prevention, detection, disruption and response. Illustrative measures include warnings at the point of initiating large-value transfer payments, blocking or flagging spoofed calls, screening for fraudulent profiles and pages, and blocking malicious advertising. The paper indicates the initial focus would be fraud targeting individual Canadians, extending to small organizations where appropriate. Finally, the discussion paper also canvasses oversight options, including a central regulator to monitor and enforce cross-sector compliance, with sector-specific rules potentially overseen by industry regulators such as the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada for federally regulated financial institutions and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for telecommunications providers.

The Ontario Securities Commission has published an overview and is seeking stakeholder feedback on how to build a machine-readable dataset of its securities rules and related regulatory documents, aimed at improving access, clarity and usability of the Ontario regulatory framework and reducing compliance burden. The initiative would translate existing regulatory instruments from PDF and HTML into structured formats such as JSON or XML, with metadata tagging and an underlying ontology or taxonomy to label provisions and map connections across documents. The OSC’s early work, supported by RegGenome and informed by preliminary stakeholder input in 2025, explored machine-assisted annotation by OSC experts to categorise segments of statutes, regulations, rules and policies to improve searchability, highlight linkages such as statute-to-regulation and national instrument-to-staff notice relationships, and support both human and machine analysis, including for RegTech and AI use cases. Among other things, the overview also offers a deep dive into possible use cases, outlining the different potential users of a machine-readable dataset and how they would use it. It distinguishes between “first-tier” commercial use cases for software engineers and data scientists building compliance and analytical tools and “second-tier” operational and research use cases including regulatory intake, change management, lineage and impact tracking, and benchmarking. Interested stakeholders are invited to provide input in areas such as the potential impact and benefits of the initiative, prioritization criteria for converting documents into machine readable format, and use cases.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to implement the GENIUS Act pathway that allows payment stablecoin issuers with consolidated outstanding issuance of not more than USD 10 billion to opt into state-level regulation, provided the relevant state framework is substantially similar to the federal regulatory framework. The proposal would establish broad-based principles for determining when a state-level regulatory regime qualifies as substantially similar, and is Treasury’s first proposed regulation to implement the Act. The proposal defines the “federal regulatory framework” to include the Act, relevant Office of the Comptroller of the Currency interpretations and regulations published in the Federal Register, and, for specified provisions, Treasury materials for Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions compliance and Federal Reserve Board materials for anti-tying. It distinguishes between “uniform requirements” under section 4(a) that state regimes must implement consistently with the federal framework in all substantive respects and “state-calibrated requirements” where states have discretion but must achieve outcomes at least as stringent and protective as the federal framework. It also sets expectations for state regimes covering transition to federal oversight, applications and licensing, supervision and enforcement, custody and insolvency, while allowing divergence on non-substantive matters of form or procedure and permitting additional state requirements that do not conflict with federal law or undermine substantial similarity.

The U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has launched the Financial Intelligence Fusion Center (FIFC), a secure, bi-directional intelligence-sharing portal for itself and its members to share timely information on cybersecurity and fraud threats and coordinate responses. Notably, the FIFC will collect, analyse and disseminate threat intelligence to strengthen firms’ awareness and support faster responses. Developed as part of FINRA Forward, the platform was piloted last year with a diverse group of member firms, whose feedback helped refine its functionality and effectiveness. Member firms can submit intelligence through the portal for analysis by a dedicated FINRA team, with resulting intelligence products and potential threat notifications shared with participating firms. The portal also includes search functionality allowing firms to proactively search published intelligence by topic and type. FINRA noted that participation in the FIFC is voluntary and does not relieve firms of their existing obligations under federal securities laws, regulations or FINRA rules, including filing and reporting requirements.

The Central Bank of Brazil has opened a public consultation on draft amendments to the rulebook for operators of settlement, registration and centralised depository systems in the Brazilian Payment System, proposing tighter authorization, governance, capital, technology, cyber and interoperability standards. The package is intended to strengthen system safety and operational resilience and align the framework more closely with international financial market infrastructure standards. The draft would make authorizations dependent on the absence of unresolved supervisory findings that are relevant to the request or could increase risks to the Brazilian Payment System, while allowing the Central Bank of Brazil to require reasonable assurance reports from independent auditors. Operators would have to notify the central bank of administrator appointments and changes with evidence of technical and strategic capacity, maintain an annually reviewed information technology master plan, test business continuity arrangements for relevant IT services provided abroad, and subject business continuity and cyber arrangements to biennial internal audit review and independent reasonable assurance. Minimum net worth would be calculated after deducting goodwill and other intangibles, and the central bank could require higher levels where risks warrant. The proposal also strengthens central counterparty rules by requiring credit resources to cover at least the joint default of the two groups with the largest exposures, broadening the cases in which the same standard applies for liquidity coverage, making margin models more conservative, including 99.5% coverage of expected moves and ten years of historical scenarios, and tightening diligence over qualified liquidity providers. It also clarifies recovery-time targets, sets decision-making quorums for interoperability arrangements, and would require operators to follow the central bank's accounting and audit framework for regulated institutions.

he Eastern Caribbean Central Bank has published its Strategic Plan for 2026 to 2031, setting six priority themes to guide its mandate and its contribution to the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union growth agenda. The plan centres on maintaining monetary stability, preserving financial stability, advancing payment modernisation and financial inclusion, promoting inclusive economic growth and partnerships, enabling a digital and data driven culture, and strengthening organisational effectiveness. Key measures under the financial stability agenda include adoption of Basel II and Basel III standards for licensed financial institutions, new legal frameworks, operationalisation of the Office of Financial Conduct and Inclusion for financial consumer protection and business conduct oversight, the Eastern Caribbean Deposit Insurance Corporation, a macroprudential framework to monitor and mitigate systemic risks, a crisis resolution framework to strengthen readiness for financial disruptions, and further rollout of the regional credit bureau to credit unions, development banks and other designated entities, alongside the Eastern Caribbean Financial Standards Board as a proposed integrated regulator for the non-bank financial sector. Payments and market development priorities include a Regional Financial Inclusion Strategy to support access to basic accounts, digital financial tools and consumer empowerment, a fast payment system for real-time digital transactions across the currency union, the CARICOM Payment and Settlement System pilot for real-time, low-cost cross-border payments across CARICOM member states, and development of a retail bond programme to broaden individual investor access to regional capital markets. The digital agenda includes an enterprise data and artificial intelligence strategy with data governance and guardrails for artificial intelligence models, a modern data warehouse, and staff training in data science, digital policy, and emerging technologies.

The Bermuda Monetary Authority published a feedback letter on its discussion paper on asset tokenisation, summarising stakeholder input and setting out its initial policy direction for regulating tokenisation activity under the Digital Assets Business Act 2018 (DABA) and signalling that it will issue a consultation paper in April 2026 detailing its regulatory approach. Overall, stakeholders broadly supported a principles-based framework but called for clearer licensing expectations, reduced duplication across regimes, and legislative updates to support tokenised structures. The BMA indicated that DABA’s definitions are sufficiently broad to cover tokenised assets and that supervision will focus on governance, custody and client asset protection, suitability and disclosure, and the delineation of functional roles across issuers, intermediaries and custodians. To address dual-licensing concerns, it proposed clarifying regulatory taxonomy (including introducing a definition of “tokenised investments”), reviewing the Investment Business Act 2003 (IBA) schedule to guide when a token is an investment, harmonising investor qualification definitions across frameworks, and creating mirrored exemptions to manage overlapping requirements between DABA, the IBA, the Investment Funds Act 2006, and related regimes, while maintaining applicable cyber risk and Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing requirements. The letter outlined the BMA’s intended work on fund tokenisation, including proposed amendments to allow fund registers to be tokenised and maintained on-chain, and set out supervisory expectations for custody, including segregation and bankruptcy-remoteness arrangements, reconciliations and proof-of-reserve requirements, and the use of high-threshold multi-signature or Multi-Party Computation controls. Moreover, it proposed expanding the application of the DAB AML/ATF sector-specific guidance notes to all regulated financial institutions engaging with tokenised assets and described expectations on operational resilience and outsourcing, independent smart contract security audits, and clear, audience-appropriate disclosures.