Laws And Regulations On Virtual Account Payment

The third-party payment, which is a product of the electronic commerce's online payments, offers a solution for the safety and integrity problems in the electronic commerce payments. Virtual account payment, as a sub mode of the third party payment, is seriously suspected because of the risks it bears. In the perspective of virtual account payment, the paper analyzes its existing problems and risks in terms of the laws aspect, reflect upon how to improve our country's virtual account payment regulations and make specific suggestions.This paper included four parts:The fist part defines what is virtual account payment and sums up its characteristics,concluding that virtual account payment was the real third-party payment。On this basis,this part combs the process of the virtual account in order to understand its potential risk .The second part focuses on analyzing problems and potential risk that exists in the virtual account payment from a legal point of view. Which includes three aspects: first, there are risks in the qualifications of virtual account provider which named third-party payment organization and its main business scope. Second, issuing virtual payment medium has a negative impact on the existing monetary and financial systems. And the medium itself has legal risks and other risks such as operational risks. Third, there is a credit risk and liquidity risks in customer money, and it exists money laundering by virtual accounts. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to perfect the laws and regulations of virtual account payment.The third part describes legislation of the US and the EU in online payment mechanisms, as well as their supervisions practice on PayPal which is the typical payment organization. Their regulation measures can provide significant reference to our country.The fourth part makes specific recommendations on improving regulations of the virtual account payment. It includes: insisting that the combination of learning and innovation, fully utilizing the existing legal system, strengthening the basis legal environment of virtual account payment; improving the main market access, and early implementing the license; learning from the regulation on EU e-money institutions to regulate the behavior of third-party payment organization to issuing the virtual medium; coming up with preventive measures against the risk of different types of funds ,such as strengthening the credit system and enhancing the standardized management of virtual settlement systems; Strengthening third-party payment organizations'responsibility of anti-money laundering.