Line Taiwan Ltd (台灣連線) could lose points in the competition for Web-only bank licenses after it failed to provide payment information and client data to investigators probing a case of alleged fraud, Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) Chairman Wellington Koo (顧立雄) said yesterday.
Local Chinese-language media last week reported that the company failed to provide billing information to prosecutors after a man surnamed Chen said that his credit card was charged more than NT$10,000 via Line Pay at a convenience store in April last year for a transaction he did not make.
He is not registered with Line Pay, Chen added.
Line Taiwan said that its client data are managed by its parent company, Line Corp, in Japan, the reports said.
“Line Taiwan might have points deducted when competing for the online bank license if it does not provide the data,” Koo told reporters, referring to a four-category scoring system the commission announced in October. The management category — covering risk control, consumer protection, information security and compliance — accounts for 30 percent of the total score.
The commission would ask CTBC Bank (中信銀行), one of Line Taiwan’s partners, to help resolve the issue, Koo said.
“Line should be given zero points in the management category,” New Power Party Legislator Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) told a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee yesterday.
All banks in the nation must have information storage and data centers in Taiwan and the institutions that want to run Web-only banks need to comply with the regulation as well, Koo said.
“Given the nation’s isolation from the international community, we should improve the supervision of this [regulation], as we cannot get much legal assistance from other nations,” he said.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office in August sent a letter to Line Taiwan asking the company to help with the investigation.
The office provided the credit card and mobile phone number involved in the case and asked Line Taiwan to provide transaction data, Line Taiwan communications officer Liao Wan-ning (廖婉寧) told the Taipei Times by telephone yesterday.
The office also asked whether the person involved in the case had used Line Pay’s non-member services, she said.
The company is willing to cooperate with the investigation, but the office needs to provide more details, such as the date and location of the alleged fraud and the amount of money involved, Liao said, adding that Line Pay has no non-member services for offline transactions conducted at convenience stores.
Asked about Koo’s remarks, Liao said Line Taiwan would communicate with the commission and comply with the regulations.
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