The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday gave conditional approval for EasyCard Corp (悠遊卡) to digitalize EasyCards, allowing users to link a virtual account to their EasyCard to make online payments.
The breakthrough follows two days of dispute over this issue.
EasyCard Corp has agreed to guarantee to register the real names of all users of its digital cards and to continue to seek regulatory approval under the Act Governing Issuance of Electronic Stored Value Cards (電子票證發行管理條例), the commission said, adding that FSC Vice Chairman Cheng Cheng-mount (鄭貞茂) had presided over the meeting with company chairman Kenneth Lin (林向愷).
The commission said that deposits on digital cards would be capped at NT$10,000 (US$332.7), with each transaction limited to NT$1,000 and the number of transactions per day limited to three.
The commission added that it would provide support to speed up the approval process.
From EasyCard’s perspective, not requiring the registration of real names would make the system more accessible to visitors from abroad.
At the same time, EasyCard has been working with banks to launch cobranded credit cards, which meet real-name registration requirements.
The commission has been concerned about the lack of real-name registration for the majority of the estimated 65 million EasyCards in circulation.
Exempting EasyCard could create unfair competition for rival cards such as iPass Corp (一卡通票證) and payment services such as O’Pay (歐付寶).
All other services have applied for licenses to process online payments under the Act Governing Electronic Payment Institutions (電子支付機構管理條例), which requires real name registration and regulatory monitoring.
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