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FTC Bans Humboldt, BRICS Payments Push & India's UPI Fee Squeeze
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A payment processor is permanently banned by the FTC for facilitating over 1,000 fraudulent shell merchants — and every high-risk acquirer should be recalibrating its compliance exposure. Plus: India's UPI expands to 10 countries, SBI posts record profits, the RBI reopens cooperative bank licensing, and Nvidia's $12.9B Hugging Face acquisition signals a race to control AI infrastructure.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A payment processor just got permanently banned by the FTC, and the penalty is only part of the story. Humboldt Merchant Services has been ordered to pay twelve million dollars and is permanently barred from processing payments for high-risk merchants.
While domestic regulators tighten the screws on fraud, the cross-border payments landscape is moving in a very different direction. India's central bank has signed memoranda of understanding with the UAE, Mauritius, Maldives, and Indonesia, and UPI is now live in ten countries.
Staying in India, the tension between bank profitability and regulatory pressure on fees is sharpening into something concrete. State Bank of India just posted its highest-ever quarterly profit, with net interest income up fifteen percent and loan-loss provisions down thirty-two percent.
The RBI is also reopening urban cooperative bank licensing for the first time in roughly two decades, with strict eligibility thresholds: minimum ten thousand crore in deposits, three hundred crore in net worth, and at least ten years of operations for certain categories. The guardrails are deliberately high.
Two large deals this week confirm a pattern worth naming directly. Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face for twelve point nine three billion dollars.
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