Spain — Conduct, Safeguarding & Promotions

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RD 712/2010 safeguarding template plus BdE/SEPBLAC June-2025 proportionality guidance on account restriction/closure.

Standing sub-brief · as of 8 July 2026144 words · last cycle 2026-10-12

Conduct, Safeguarding & Financial Promotions

Real Decreto 712/2010 sets out the safeguarding methods available to payment institutions protecting user funds: segregation in safe, liquid, low-risk assets, or an insurance policy or comparable guarantee meeting specified conditions. In June 2025, joint Banco de España and SEPBLAC good-practice criteria required proportionate, documented, case-by-case justification for account restriction or closure decisions taken for AML/CFT reasons, guarding against unjustified financial exclusion. The two instruments together define the standing conduct baseline for Spanish PIs and EMIs: a funded, verifiable safeguarding method plus a proportionality constraint on the account-closure powers banks and non-banks alike exercise for financial-crime reasons, a constraint directly relevant to the de-risking and financial-inclusion concerns raised in correspondent-banking access debates.

Periodic update · new data 2026-10-12

Conduct, Safeguarding & Financial Promotions

Real Decreto 813/2026 makes two conduct-of-business adjustments relevant to payments, both minor relative to the decree's primary AML and gambling focus. It eases access to free basic payment accounts for economically vulnerable persons by allowing certain non-profit entities to certify financial-exclusion risk on behalf of applicants, a change to the gateway through which vulnerable persons access basic payment-account rights rather than to the underlying basic-account entitlement itself. Separately, it flexibilises and expands the electronic payment means available for payments made to Spanish public administrations, specifically enabling card-based electronic payment instruments as a means of paying public bodies. Neither provision touches Banco de España's licensing or prudential framework for payment institutions or electronic-money institutions; both operate at the level of who may certify eligibility or what instrument may be used for a specific payment category, rather than altering any authorisation or safeguarding requirement.

These changes sit within a decree whose primary substance is AML and gambling-regulatory, and the payments-conduct provisions should be read as incidental adjustments rather than evidence of a broader Banco de España conduct-rule overhaul this cycle. No change to financial-promotions rules, safeguarding requirements for client funds, or other core W1b obligations was evidenced.

Outlook

No further payments-conduct development is signalled for the near term beyond these two incidental provisions. Whether Banco de España or the Ministry of Economy issues implementing guidance on which non-profit entities may certify financial-exclusion risk is the main open item, though nothing in the material reviewed indicates a timeline for such guidance.

1 earlier distinct update(s)

Periodic update · new data 2026-09-14

Conduct, Safeguarding & Financial Promotions

The PSR component of the PSD3/PSR package introduces two directly relevant conduct and safeguarding changes for Spanish payment institutions and e-money institutions once transposed. First, it extends provider liability explicitly to authorised push payment (APP) fraud, a confirmed provision in the published provisional compromise text. Second, it requires safeguarding diversification across at least two credit institutions for payment institutions and e-money institutions, a segregation-mechanism requirement intended to reduce concentration risk in how client funds are safeguarded.

These two provisions should be read together as raising both the conduct-liability and the operational-safeguarding bar for Spanish PI/EMI-tier firms. The APP-fraud liability extension is particularly significant in the Spanish context because it arrives after, rather than before, a domestic judicial precedent already moving in the same direction: the Tribunal Supremo's sentencia 571/2025 ordered a bank to refund over €56,000 lost to phishing and SIM-swap fraud specifically because the institution failed to react to evident fraud signals, a standard closely anticipating PSR's explicit statutory liability obligation. Firms should treat the current judicial standard as a live compliance benchmark now, ahead of PSR's formal transposition into Spanish law.

The safeguarding-diversification requirement is distinctly a non-bank PI/EMI obligation: bank-supervised payment activity in Spain is not subject to the same client-funds segregation mechanism, since bank deposit protection operates under a separate prudential framework entirely.

Outlook

Spanish PI/EMI-tier firms should begin assessing safeguarding-arrangement diversification across multiple credit institutions ahead of PSR's formal transposition, and should treat the Tribunal Supremo's evident-fraud-signal standard as the operative APP-fraud liability benchmark in the interim period before statutory codification.

Sources and findings (5)

W1bConduct, Safeguarding & Promotionslimited signalConfirmedconfirmed 2026-07-04▾#

Conduct, Safeguarding & Financial Promotions

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