Overseen by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the charter would allow firms like Facebook, Google or Amazon to bypass the process by which they need to collect money transmitter licenses state by state. It would instead offer payment companies a national servicing platform to replace the regime of state regulations such firms would be subject to under existing laws.
“We oppose the OCC’s effort to grant commercial companies like Amazon or Facebook a national payments charter to access to the Federal Reserve payments system and safety net, [the] most critical part of our country’s financial infrastructure … without protecting the financial system and consumers from the concomitant increase in systemic risk,” industry leaders wrote in a recent letter to key lawmakers.