New Rules for Apple Pay and Venmo as CFPB Expands Regulatory Reach

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) no longer only regulates banks, but also Apple and other companies that provide digital wallets and payment apps. It will focus on companies that process more than 50 million transactions per year and ensure they have “the authority to conduct proactive examinations to ensure companies are complying with the law in these and other areas,” according to a bureau statement. “Supervision also is an important tool for the CFPB to assess risks that can emerge rapidly in this market, including from outages and other issues that could lead to millions of consumers losing access to their funds.”

The CFPB will oversee Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, and other services in the areas of privacy and surveillance, debanking (losing access to an app without notice), and errors and fraud. This might provide people greater ways to opt out of data collecting and prevent companies from misrepresenting their data protection procedures, among other measures. “Digital payments have advanced from novelty to necessity, and our monitoring must reflect this fact. “The rule will help to protect consumer privacy, combat fraud, and prevent illegal account closures,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. In October, the CFPB penalized Apple and Goldman Sachs $89 million for deceiving customers and failing to follow through on disputed transactions on the Apple Card.

The CFPB first recommended this structure in November 2023, but the final policies have altered. Most notably, organizations were originally required to perform only five million transactions, rather than fifty million. It also limited the number to only US dollars, rather than a broader range. The supervision will go into effect 30 days after the Federal Register publication.