FINLAND Law and Practice Contributed by: Olli Kiuru, Mia Rintasalo and Essi Hietaoja, Waselius
late the conditions that need to be fulfilled in the provision of payment services. Therefore, pay - ment processors are free to create and imple - ment new payment rails on the condition that they comply with the PSA and PIA. However, in order to engage in the practice of payment services, a payment processor will need to be authorised by the FIN-FSA as a payment institu - tion or a credit institution. 5.2 Regulation of Cross-Border Payments and Remittances At the EU level, payments and remittances are primarily regulated under PSD2. The Instant Pay - ments Regulation (EU) 2024/886 aims to accel - erate the roll-out of instant payments and covers credit transfers denominated in euros within the EU. In addition to PSD2, it amends several EU regulations and is expected to be implemented into Finnish law in 2025. In addition to general legal requirements under PSD2, as transposed into the PSA and the PIA, cross-border payments are subject to specific information-reporting requirements under the Act governing the information-reporting requirement (659/2023), which implements Council Directive (EU) 2020/284. In Finland, the information shall be reported to the Finnish Tax Administration, which will deliver the collected information to the European Commission’s Central Electronic System of Payments. Finland is also a member of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA), a payment-integration initiative of the EU that seeks to improve the efficiency of cross-border payments. Furthermore, money remittance activities, par - ticularly those of the Hawala type, are generally considered to pose a high risk of money laun - dering and terrorist financing. In recent years,
the FIN-FSA has strengthened its supervisory measures for these companies, imposed pen - alty payments on those that fail to comply with the anti-money laundering and sanctions regula - tion, and even revoked the registration of some money remittance service providers. 6. Marketplaces, Exchanges and Trading Platforms 6.1 Permissible Trading Platforms The regulation on trading venues derives from MiFID II and covers regulated markets, multilat - eral trading facilities (MTFs) and organised trad - ing facilities (OTFs). MTFs and OTFs are regulat - ed nationally via Chapter 5 of the Act on Trading in Financial Instruments (1070/2017), which provides the general requirements applicable to both trading venues. According to Section 1 of Chapter 5, in addition to the stock exchange, only investment firms, credit institutions and third-country branches may maintain MTFs and OTFs in Finland. MiCAR governs the operation of trading plat - forms for crypto-assets. A crypto-asset trad - ing platform is a regulated entity under MiCAR that facilitates the trading of crypto-assets in a multilateral system that brings together multiple third-party buying and selling interests. These platforms must be authorised as CASPs and comply with strict operational, organisational and prudential requirements. 6.2 Regulation of Different Asset Classes In general, different asset classes do not have different regulatory regimes in Finland; rather, regulatory regimes are separated by the provision of certain services. For instance, offering invest - ment services, regardless of the asset classes offered, requires an entity to be licensed under
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