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ATPC Trans-Atlantic Tour

ATPC Completes Trans-Atlantic Policy Exchange

Leaders from the ATPC traveled to London and Dublin recently for meetings with members, prospects, and leading trade associations. The trip is the first post-COVID lockdown and builds upon the long history of U.K. engagement that started with our launch of the P20 conference in 2016.

The London portion of the trip was particularly fruitful and jam-packed, with the trip commencing at Paysafe, with former ATPC board chair and company CEO, Bruce Lowthers providing insights into the direction of ATPC strategy. The ATPC team, comprised of West Richards (Executive Director), Michael Mills (Chief Operating Officer), Tom Worrall (federal government relations) and Jay Morgan (state government relations), also met with leadership from the following organizations:

• UK Finance
• Trust Payments
• Industry dinner featuring: Payments Innovation Forum; Paysafe; Mastercard; Discover; Blackhawk; WorldPay; and Trusted Networks
• Worldpay UK offices
• RedCompass (new ATPC member)
• Featurespace

“We launched P20 in 2017 to annually bring together the ‘twenty’ leading payments decision makers from London and Atlanta to exchange notes on policy and business,” said ATPC Executive Director H. West Richards. In recent years under new and independent leadership the annual conference evolved into a unique yet consequential collaborative space for thought leadership and the consideration of best practices and ideas for harmonizing global standards on key non-competitive issues facing the industry. P20 hosts forums for these conversations to flourish and regularly publishes thought leadership and best practice reports. The P20 vision is to create a more accessible, secure, and inclusive payments ecosystem.

ATPC saw a need to return to the U.K. and share real-time American policy developments highlighting some of the key day-to-day blocking and tackling aspects of regulatory affairs on a granular level while learning about new and future developments actively being considered by U.K. and European Union with regard to ever-changing regulatory schemes.

Meetings during the trip confirmed the value in regularly sharing information, especially as regulators and lawmakers on both sides of the ocean grapple with issues including but not limited to open banking, AI, privacy, cybersecurity, and digital currency.

West and Michael then decamped to Dublin for meetings with leaders of Ireland’s payments industry. The sessions were particularly valuable because these companies work under both the UK and EU regulatory framework.

Dublin meetings included a dinner hosted by the Fintech Corridor and some of their members, PayPal, Digital DNA and Origin. And the ATPC team closed out the trip with a Paysafe dinner.

The ATPC will continue to engage its members and partners in England and Ireland to ensure we stay on the cutting edge of critical policy issues confronting the payments processing industry.