The Law of Digital Payments

Equips legal professionals and stakeholders with a clear, authoritative, and practical guide to the UK legal treatment of digital payments and tokenised assets.

The Law of Digital Payments is a guide to UK payments law, examining how English law and financial regulation are adapting to new forms of money and new ways of moving it. Value now passes between banks, payment service providers and distributed ledgers, and AI agents are beginning to initiate payments. For lawyers and compliance professionals, this raises fundamental questions about when a debt is discharged, who bears the loss when a payment goes wrong, and which activities fall within the regulatory perimeter.

This title sets out the legal concepts of payment and money before mapping the regulatory perimeter under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, the Regulated Activities Order 2001, the Payment Services Regulations 2017 and the Electronic Money Regulations 2011. Later chapters provide clarity on funds transfers and settlement, card payments, open banking and payment initiation, digital wallets, strong customer authentication, unauthorised transactions and the recovery of misdirected payments, including authorised push payment (APP) fraud. Coverage of tokenised payment includes the classification of cryptoassets and their status as property. The new UK regimes for stablecoins and tokenised deposits are considered alongside the proposed digital pound. The final chapters address the protection of customer funds when a payment or e-money institution becomes insolvent. They also examine the legal questions raised by agentic payments, in which an AI agent makes payments on a user's behalf.

Drawing upon legislation, FCA rules and guidance, case law and current reform proposals, the book is designed to help practitioners, in-house counsel, regulators, payment firms and academics understand and apply the law of digital payments.

This title is included in Bloomsbury Professional's Banking and Finance Law online service.