The Shanghai branch of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has just dispensed the largest ever administrative penalty imposed upon a third party payments provider in China.
PBOC’s Shanghai branch announced on 12 July that it had imposed an administrative penalty worth 59.3941 million yuan in total on local payments provider iPS (环迅支付) for breaches of payment operations provisions.
iPS is a Shanghai-based company that provides both domestic and cross-border payments service, and first obtained its operations license in 2011.
The company’s current business scope includes nationwide internet payments, nationwide mobile payments, nationwide fixed line payments, as well as bank card acquisition operations in the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong, Fujian and Tianjin.
iPS previously incurred administrative penalties worth 1.78 million yuan for breaches of payments regulations in 2017, and penalties worth 1.7 million yuan in 2018 for failure to perform customer identification duties or save customer identification information and transaction records in accordance with regulations, leading to transactions by clients whose identities were unclear
PBOC data indicates that it has issued nearly 60 fines to Chinese payments providers since the start of 2019, worth over 100 million yuan in total.
