Germany’s ‘Lex Apple Pay’: Payment Services Regulation Overtakes Competition Enforcement

, and Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation. The author gratefully acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through CRC TR 224 (Project B05). In accordance with this journal’s rules of disclosure, the author has nothing else to disclose

Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, Volume 12, Issue 2, February 2021, Pages 68–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeclap/lpaa032

Cite

Jens-Uwe Franck, Dimitrios Linardatos, Germany’s ‘Lex Apple Pay’: Payment Services Regulation Overtakes Competition Enforcement, Journal of European Competition Law & Practice, Volume 12, Issue 2, February 2021, Pages 68–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeclap/lpaa032

Extract

I. Introduction

Mobile payments appear to be the payment technology of the near future in the point-of-sale business. As in most markets when a wave of digitalization sweeps through, incumbents, big tech companies, and newcomers are all struggling to secure the biggest slice of the cake for themselves. In Germany, recent regulatory intervention has the potential to rebalance the relative strengths of the protagonists: the legislature enacted a provision with effect from 1 January 2020 that aims to help payment service providers to access the ‘technical infrastructure’ 1 that contributes to mobile and internet-based payment services. This new Section 58a of the German Payment Services Supervisory Act (PSSA) has become known as the ‘Lex Apple Pay’ since its immediate objective is widely understood as providing payment service providers, particularly established banks such as German savings banks, access to the iPhone’s contactless payment chip, which is called the near-field communication (NFC) interface. 2