United States — Maine (US-ME)

Other Developments

Maine's core non-bank payments licensing regime continues to run through the Money Transmission Modernization Act (MMTMA), 32 M.R.S. Chapter 79-A, effective August 9, 2024, which replaced the prior Money Transmitters Act and is administered by the Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection via NMLS. An administrative modernisation completed this cycle: the Bureau migrated its surety-bond process to Electronic Surety Bonds via NMLS beginning September 1, 2025, with all existing licensees required to convert by January 31, 2026 — a deadline that has now passed. The statute continues to exempt supervised financial organizations, i.e., banks, and payment-system operators processing between exempted persons or licensees from money-transmission licensure, preserving Maine's dual-track regime in which non-bank payment institutions are licensed by the Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection while bank-chartered PSPs are supervised separately by the Bureau of Financial Institutions.

On the conduct side, Maine sellers and merchants remain prohibited from imposing credit or debit card surcharges under 9-A M.R.S. §8-509, subject only to a narrow government-entity carve-out for taxes, fines, and fees — one of just four US jurisdictions, alongside Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico, maintaining a full surcharge ban as of 2026. That standing prohibition sits apart from a separate national development: the revised Visa/Mastercard interchange-fee antitrust settlement received preliminary federal court approval in June 2026, though final approval is not expected until late 2026 or early 2027, and the settlement carries no Maine-specific provisions.

Maine's community-banking and trust sector continued to consolidate. Gorham Savings Bank and Maine Community Bancorp completed their merger effective January 1, 2026, forming an enlarged Maine Community Bank that is now the largest mutual savings bank operating exclusively in Maine, with more than 370 employees. Separately, Corient Partners, LLC filed on April 3, 2026 to establish Corient Maine Trust Company, LP, and on June 3, 2026 applied to acquire substantially all trust assets of H.M. Payson & Co., with regulatory approval still pending.

On instant payments, a cohort of Maine state-chartered banks — Auburn Savings, Bangor Savings, First National Bank Damariscotta, Franklin Savings, and Maine Community Bank — are live on the Federal Reserve's FedNow Service. The Federal Reserve Board has also proposed, in an April 2026 public-comment release, to allow US banks and credit unions to use intermediaries within FedNow transfers, a step that would extend the domestic correspondent-banking model to the international leg of cross-border payments. Smaller Maine institutions already depend on correspondent structures for rail access: EasCorp, a corporate credit union correspondent, settles instant payments via a pooled joint account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on behalf of member credit unions, providing FedNow, RTP, ACH, and wire access without direct Fed master-account connectivity.

On enforcement, the Bureau of Consumer Credit Protection's consent-order practice against Bitcoin Depot sits alongside the Maine Attorney General's standing authority under the Maine Unfair Trade Practices Act to investigate and sue over unfair or deceptive payment practices, with consumers retaining a private right of action including recovery of attorney's fees. Separately, Maine's check cashers and cash-dispensing machine operators remain subject to registration and fee caps under Title 32 Chapter 80 — 5% of face value, or 6% without identification, with lower caps for government-benefit payment instruments — administered distinctly from full money-transmitter licensure. Maine residents also remain protected by the Notice of Risk to Personal Data Act, which requires 30-day breach notification to affected residents, nationwide credit-reporting-agency notification where more than 1,000 persons are affected, and notification to state regulators.

Cross-Monitor Connections

The Bitcoin Depot enforcement action, and the underlying crypto-kiosk fraud it addresses, involves scam proceeds that moved through unhosted wallets — an illicit-finance and fraud-proceeds dimension that sits beyond this monitor's consumer-protection scope and has been flagged to the Financial Illicit-finance Monitor for its own analysis of the wallet and proceeds pathway. On the AML/CFT side, Maine's Bureau of Financial Institutions conducts BSA/AML examinations of state-chartered institutions alongside safety-and-soundness and IT reviews, and MMTMA licensees separately cross-reference federal Bank Secrecy Act obligations; the Sentinel.gi payments-context feed that ordinarily supplies this monitor's illicit-finance framing was not accessible this cycle, so this remains standing statutory scaffolding rather than original analysis.