- The Royal Decree-Law on payment services and other urgent financial measures transposes several European directives with an expired term and adapts the internal legal system to some community regulations
- The adaptation of European regulations will allow, among other things, to improve the protection of the rights of users of payment services, increase supervisory effectiveness to guarantee the protection of investors against possible market abuse behaviors and increase the effectiveness of the framework of supervision and resolution of financial institutions
The Council of Ministers has approved the Royal Decree-Law (RDL) of payment services and other urgent measures in financial matters. This RDL transposes a series of European directives, with expired transposition deadline and open infringement procedure, and adapts the internal legal system to some community regulations already in force.
With the approval of this Royal Decree-Law, the Ministry of Economy and Business continues to make progress in the process of transposition and adaptation of our internal regulations to European regulations and to the recommendations of the main international organizations.
Directives
The RDL includes the partial transposition of the Directive on payment services in the internal market, whose transposition period expired in January 2018.
The objective of this Directive is to create an integrated payment services framework at European level and to face the new challenges and changes in payment services, in particular those made with card, internet and mobile phones, to ensure the security of transactions
The transposition of this Directive into the Spanish legal system allows to improve the protection of the rights of the users of payment services, with the aim that they can carry out safer transactions, while encouraging innovation.
Specifically, the rights of the clients are reinforced, as the payer's responsibility is reduced to 50 euros for losses arising from unauthorized payment operations as a result of theft or theft of a payment instrument. Likewise, the terms of resolution of claims are reduced to 15 days and the security requirements in the authentication of clients are reinforced, in order to avoid the impersonation or theft of keys.
With regard to the promotion of innovation, the scope of regulation is extended to accommodate two new payment services: payment initiators, intermediaries that guarantee consumer payment to the merchant as an alternative to card payments; and account aggregators, which consolidate all the information of the various accounts that a user has open in different entities and classify it by categories.
Also, the transposition of the Implementation Directive on market abuse, when considering the possibility of denouncing to the CNMV anonymously certain breaches contemplated in the European Regulation of market abuse. The deadline for transposition of this Directive expired in July 2016.
In the RDL the transposition of the Capital Requirements Directive, known as CRD IV, and whose transposition deadline expired in 2013. Although this Directive was already considered transposed, the European Commission initiated an infringement procedure last year because it was considered incomplete.
In order to comply with the provisions of the Directive, a whistleblowing channel is included in the Bank of Spain aimed at communicating non-compliances of credit institutions regarding solvency. Likewise, certain obligations of the CNMV and the Bank of Spain are incorporated in the field of information exchange and cooperation and coordination between different competent authorities of the European Union is improved.
Regulations
Additionally, through this Royal Decree-Law, the Spanish legal system is adapted to a series of community regulations that, by their very nature, are directly applicable since their entry into force, in order to improve the legal security of market operators and the efficiency of its operation.
With this objective, the internal regulations are adapted to adapt it to the Market Abuse Regulation, incorporating into the Securities Market Law the necessary provisions to assign to the CNMV the powers of supervision, inspection and sanction and detailing the infractions and applicable sanctions.
The Securities Market Law is also adapted to incorporate the necessary provisions on supervision, inspection and sanction of breaches of the Regulation on benchmark indices, as well as the Regulation on fundamental data documents related to packaged retail investment products and insurance-based investment products and the Regulation on transparency of securities financing and reuse operations, attributing the corresponding powers to the CNMV.
Finally, Spanish regulations are adapted for the correct application of the Regulation on money market funds, by including a modification in Law 35/2003 of collective investment institutions, which will allow establishing the sanctioning regime for breaches of the Regulations and whose competence will also be the CNMV.
Other contents
The Royal Decree-Law includes a series of improvements and technical adjustments in order to ensure the correct execution of another set of Directives already transposed to our legal system.
