United States — Florida (US-FL)

Other Developments

Alongside the stablecoin framework, Florida enacted HB505, the Virtual Currency Kiosk Act, creating a registration-only regime, not full licensing, for VC kiosk operators, with already-licensed money transmitters exempted. Effective dates are staged: consumer-protection provisions, including transaction limits, disclosures and refund rights, take effect 1 January 2027, while the operator registration requirement follows on 1 March 2027. Those protections respond to more than $33 million in FBI/FTC-reported Florida kiosk-fraud losses between January 2020 and December 2025, and will impose daily transaction limits of $2,000 for new customers and $10,000 for existing customers, plus mandatory full refunds within 72 hours for fraud losses. Chapter 560 licensing applicants remain subject to bonding requirements under s.560.209, F.S., a corporate surety bond or collateral of $50,000 to $2,000,000 depending on size and location count, with ongoing net worth of at least $100,000 and annual audited financials, against a two-year licence term and a $750 renewal fee. Conduct-side, licensees and authorised vendors must retain compliance-relevant books and records for five years and produce them to OFR within three business days of a written request under s.560.1105, F.S., while the Florida Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division has secured more than $565 million in total relief since 2019, including over $426 million in direct consumer relief, under FDUTPA — a cumulative figure that carries no as-of date on its source page and is treated here as background context pending a dated refresh.

On enforcement, the Office of Financial Regulation issued a final order on 13 March 2026 approving a consent agreement with a Delaware-based software company that had operated as an unlicensed money transmitter in Florida from January 2011 to August 2025, resulting in a $155,000 fine and a forward compliance commitment under Chapter 560. Global E-Trading LLC, doing business as Chargebacks911 and based in Florida, remains subject to a joint FTC/Florida Attorney General enforcement action, pending in federal court in Tampa, alleging use of prepaid-gift-card microtransactions to disguise merchants' true chargeback rates and evade card-network scrutiny. In scheme-compliance terms, Florida card-accepting merchants sit within the nationwide $5.54 billion Visa/Mastercard interchange-fee settlement covering January 2004 to January 2025 and affirmed by the Second Circuit in 2023, while Walmart's petition to decertify the settlement class, to allow large national merchants to pursue independent remedies against Visa and Mastercard, remained pending before Judge Cogan as of late 2025.

On market structure, Florida counted 663 licensed money services businesses operating 42,846 authorised locations and branches as of January 2025, underpinning Miami's role as the principal US gateway for Latin America and Caribbean remittance corridors, through which roughly $170 billion was remitted in 2024, 80% of it originating from the United States. Incumbent operators such as Miami-headquartered Intermex Wire Transfer, licensed across multiple US states, continue to anchor that corridor infrastructure. Félix, a Miami-based remittance fintech, runs a WhatsApp-native product requiring no app download that uses stablecoins behind the scenes to cut cost and settlement time on the US-Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras corridors, and reported its user base more than doubling from 175,000 to 400,000 and its team growing from 150 to 300 employees over the trailing twelve months to March 2026. Governor DeSantis signed the stablecoin issuer and virtual-currency-kiosk bills into law on 27 June 2026, a market-enabling regulatory event for future Florida stablecoin-issuance activity; no Florida-specific fintech or payments M&A transaction was identified within the trailing-twelve-month baseline window despite dedicated search, a gap consistent with known under-indexing of private-company deal activity.

Operational resilience remains governed by the Florida Information Protection Act, which mandates breach notification to the Department of Legal Affairs within 30 days for breaches affecting 500 or more Florida residents, among the strictest notification windows in the country, enforced by the Attorney General with penalties of up to $500,000 per incident; no DORA-equivalent dedicated resilience regime for payments firms was identified.

Cross-Monitor Connections

Two Florida payments developments carry an illicit-finance dimension that exceeds this monitor's scope and has been routed to the Financial Intelligence Monitor. A Miami-Dade-headquartered bank faces a derivative lawsuit, pending in the Southern District of Florida, over board decisions including the 2017 opening of a correspondent account for Banco de Venezuela despite competitor de-risking amid sanctions pressure, a dynamic that later drew regulatory scrutiny via a consent order. Separately, SB314 extends Bank Secrecy Act-aligned AML obligations to stablecoin issuers by adding stablecoins to the statutory definition of monetary value under the Florida Control of Money Laundering in Money Services Business Act, effective alongside the substantive stablecoin licensing provisions on 1 October 2026. The underlying AML program requirements, risk assessment, employee training, a compliance officer, and SAR filing to FinCEN upon identification of questionable transactions, are carried in this monitor via the Sentinel.gi feed rather than original illicit-finance analysis. Florida's correspondent-banking access architecture, run through Chapter 663 licensing of foreign-bank agency, branch and representative offices with capital-equivalency deposit requirements, sits alongside the Florida International Bankers Association's role as a recognised Center for Excellence for AML compliance training across the Latin America/Caribbean correspondent-banking corridor.