Understanding Australia's proposed digital wallet regulations

Soon, Australia could get substantially better accommodation for cryptocurrency businesses.

In its submission to Australia’s Senate Select Committee on Financial Technology and Regulatory Technology, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has suggested better accommodations for digital wallets, payment services and other stored value facilities.

The new APRA submission is essentially a crystallisation of earlier proposals by the Council of Financial Regulators (CFR), the coordinating body of Australian financial regulators which includes APRA (general supervisory, innovation and financial stability regulation), ASIC (securities and investment regulation), the Australian Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia.

The gist is that responsibilities should be better clarified for different regulatory bodies, and the regulatory framework for stored-value facilities could be updated in a way that better suits current and future technologies like stablecoin ecosystems, managed cryptocurrency wallets and many more.

“Under this proposal, APRA’s role in the framework would be to oversee wallets that are widely used as a means of payment and store significant value for a reasonable amount of time (e.g. potentially Facebook’s Calibra proposal),” the submission says.

On the whole, this APRA proposal is getting quite close to the pointy end of the whole process. It’s built on findings that date back years, but the fintech committee receiving the proposal will present its final report by October 2020.

The short version is that this is good for cryptocurrencies, wallets and similar things that want to operate in a well-regulated environment in Australia.

 

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Source: Understanding Australia’s proposed digital wallet regulations | Finder