United States — Indiana (US-IN)

Indiana's money transmission licensing regime is administered by the Department of Financial Institutions (DFI) under the Money Transmission Modernization Act (MTMA, SEA 458), effective 2024-01-01, which replaced the legacy IC 28-8-4 statute.

Indiana's conduct and safeguarding layer has been reshaped by the Earned Wage Access Act (EWAA, HB1125), which requires most earned-wage-access providers to hold a DFI licence effective 2026-01-01; NMLS applications were accepted from 2025-10-01, with a grace period running to 2026-04-30.

Indiana has no standalone stablecoin-issuer licensing regime; DFI guidance confirms virtual currency was not adopted into the MTMA money-transmission definition, leaving stablecoin issuance entirely outside state-specific licensure.

DFI's Depository Division supervises operational and IT risk at Indiana-chartered institutions through a series of advisory instruments: Advisory Letter 2025-03 on URSIT ratings implementation, Advisory Letter 2025-01 on Cyber Hygiene Awareness, and a Ransomware Self-Assessment Tool (R-SAT v2.0) made available to supervised institutions.

Credit-card surcharging is permitted in Indiana subject only to card-network limits — Visa caps at 3%, while Mastercard, American Express, and Discover permit up to 4% — with no Indiana-specific statutory ban or cap on the practice.

Indiana's corridor dynamics are dominated by domestic instant-payments rail build-out rather than a distinct cross-border regime.

First Merchants Corporation completed its legal closing of a merger with First Savings Financial Group on 2026-02-01, creating a combined entity with approximately $21.4bn in assets and making First Merchants the second-largest Indiana-headquartered financial holding company.

The Indiana Attorney General joined a 52-state coalition in a $700m national Google Play antitrust and in-app-payment settlement, with Indiana consumers receiving approximately $10.5m and the state a penalty share of roughly $1.4m.

Payroc WorldAccess acquired Retriever Merchant Solutions (Select Merchant Services, Inc.), a Munster, Indiana-based independent sales organisation serving approximately 30,000 merchants and roughly $5bn in annual payment volume, illustrating the consolidation of Indiana-headquartered ISOs into national acquirers.

The Earned Wage Access Act (EWAA) creates a licensed on-demand pay product category in Indiana, distinguishing employer-integrated and consumer-directed models, effective 2026-01-01 — the most significant Indiana product-innovation development identified this baseline.

The Indiana Consumer Data Protection Act (ICDPA, IC 24-15) took effect 2026-01-01, applying to entities processing personal data of at least 100,000 Indiana residents annually, or 25,000 residents where more than half of revenue derives from data sales; enforcement is Attorney-General-only, with a 30-day cure notice and penalties of up to $7,500 per violation.

This module is sourced from the Sentinel.gi feed.

Indiana's correspondent-banking landscape illustrates a structural bank-versus-non-bank access asymmetry: community banks reach wholesale settlement and instant-payments rails through correspondent channels — the Pidgin/ICBB partnership and FHLBank Indianapolis's Elevate Grant cooperative, which supports member institutions' capital-expenditure and workforce-development needs while functioning as a wholesale funding and settlement anchor — whereas non-bank payment providers have no equivalent institutional access point identified in this baseline.

First Merchants Corporation's acquisition of First Savings Financial Group, an all-stock merger signed 2025-09-24 and valued at approximately $241.3m, reached legal closing on 2026-02-01, per SEC EDGAR filing — the deal's rationale was to expand Indiana community-bank scale to approximately $21.4bn in combined assets.