A Comparative Study On The Legal System Of Third-Party Payment Service

In recent years, China’s third-party payment market have gained tremendous development.The market has been developed at more than100%growth for seven consecutive years since2005. As a new type of payment methods, the third-party payments have solved the security and credit problems in E-commerce payments, and eventually be an important guarantee for the sustainable development of the E-commerce. However, in contrast with the flourish of the third-party payments industry, the relevant legislations lag behind, it’s "regulatory vacuum" in the third-party payments for more than10years. Imperfect laws affect the healthy development of the third-party payments industry, and bring a series of risks to the industry, such as, the imperfect market access mechanism leads to the risks of disorderly competition in the industry; illness management brings to the risks of the secutity of the client funds; inadequacy protection mechanism cause the risks of infringe on the interests of consumer; and insufficiency control of the money laundering open the door for high crime rate. If these risks unchecked, would not only infringe the consumers’rights directly, but also impact the stability of the financial system of the Country. Therefore, it’s necessary for our Country to enact the laws and regulations to strengthen the management of third-party payments, guide and regulate the healthy and orderly development of third-party payment, and safeguard the interests of its clients.In2010, the People’s Bank of China promulgated the "Non-financial Institution Payment Service Management Measure" and the related enforcement regulations, take the first step in specialized third-party payment legislation."Management Measure" and its enforcement regulation establishing the market access conditions for the third-party payments institutions; strengthening the management of customer funds; improving the protection of consumer rights, and imposing the anti-money laundering duties to the third-party payments institutions. However, compared with the third-party payments relevant legislations of the foreign Countries, our’s still have some shortcomings, such as the unreasonable market access threshold; lack rules for customer funds to be utilized as well as the distribution of proceeds of the funds; lack safeguard mechanisms for unauthorized payments; inadequate rules for protected consumer rights; imperfect rules for anti-money laundering.From the international point of view, in order to cope with the risks brought about by the third-party payment, the developed Countries in the world take appropriate measures to improve their third-party payments legislations actively. United States, European Union, Japan, Australia, Singapore and other Countries and regions where third-party payments were developed earlier have already made a more comprehensive legislation according to their actual development of third-party payments. Although the legislative model and the specific provisions taken by the United States, European Union, Japan, Australia, and Singapore vary, all the legislation contains:market access requirement for third-party payments institutions, management of client funds, consumer protection, and combating money-laundering crimes.Based on the systematic research of foreign third-party payments legislations, the author summarizes the characteristics of the foreign third-party payments legal systems, and concludes the development trends of the third-party payments legislations, ie. reducing the market access threshold gradually to encourage market development and innovation; protecting the safety of customer funds strictly by establish perfect capital safeguards; intensify efforts to protect the consumer rights; increasing the responsibilities of the third-party payments institutions in anti-money laundering and so on.On the whole, the author makes a comprehensive reflection on third-party payment legislation and relevant laws of our Country, and analysed it’s main contents as well as pointed out it’s deficiencies. Finally, according to the legislations and its development trends of foreign legislations, the author puts forward the suggestions on the legislations consummate of our Country.