United States — North Carolina (US-NC)

Other Developments

This cycle marks the World Payments Monitor's first full baseline sweep of North Carolina, and it surfaces two live legislative threads worth tracking closely. House Bill 1029, the Digital Asset and Stablecoin Act, passed the NC House 115-0 in May 2026 and was sent to the Senate on June 10, 2026, where it remains pending in committee; an earlier characterisation of the bill as already enacted has been corrected following challenger review. The measure would create a Commissioner-of-Banks-supervised payment-stablecoin licensing regime aligned to the federal GENIUS Act, with a Part II effective date tied to the earlier of January 18, 2027 or 120 days after final federal rules, and would separately authorise state-chartered banks and credit unions to custody digital assets, facilitate transactions, and offer staking services. House Bill 13, which would cap credit and charge-card surcharges at 2%, down from an initial 3%, with mandatory point-of-sale disclosure and civil penalties of $2,500 to $5,000, was re-referred to the House Rules Committee on September 23, 2025, and has not been confirmed to have advanced through the Finance Committee, again correcting an earlier overstatement. Absent either bill's enactment, North Carolina today has no state-specific surcharge cap, with surcharging deferred to card-network limits of 4% for Mastercard and 3% for Visa, and no enacted stablecoin-issuer licensing regime, sitting instead behind the state's 2024 statutory prohibition on state agencies accepting a Federal-Reserve-issued CBDC or participating in CBDC pilots. On payments infrastructure, Wilmington-based Apiture launched RTP and FedNow instant-payments connectivity for community bank and credit union clients in July 2025, while the Federal Reserve's Fedwire Funds Service completed its migration to ISO 20022 messaging the same month, a change bearing on the correspondent and settlement operations of Charlotte-headquartered Truist and Bank of America. On licensing, North Carolina's Money Transmitters Act continues to anchor the state's non-bank payments perimeter, with tiered surety bonds scaling from $150,000 to $250,000-plus by transaction volume and a payee-agent exemption extended to virtual-currency transactions; NCCOB guidance separately confirms that virtual-currency kiosk operators require a full money transmitter license, a position with direct bearing on the regulator's active June 2026 consumer notice regarding crypto-ATM operator Bitcoin Depot. On payment corridor dynamics, nearly two-thirds of North Carolina's Latino population is foreign-born, sustaining strong outbound remittance demand to Latin America served in part by Durham's Latino Community Credit Union, a corridor running alongside rather than in tension with the state's domestic FedNow/RTP build-out. On consumer protection and legal exposure, North Carolina has no DORA-equivalent operational-resilience regime for payments; firms instead rely on the state's Identity Theft Protection Act breach-notification duties, which also require NCCOB-licensed entities to report breaches to the Commissioner within one business day via NMLS, layered on federal GLBA and CIRCIA obligations. NCCOB's public enforcement register remains active, including a recorded consent order against Threadneedle Private Wealth, though no landmark payments-specific court ruling was identified this sweep. Consumers otherwise rely on federal Regulation E protections and the Federal Reserve's expanded FedDetect and Scams Mitigation Toolkit, since North Carolina has no dedicated authorised-push-payment fraud reimbursement mandate.

Cross-Monitor Connections

Federal AML rulemaking is reshaping the perimeter North Carolina's own stablecoin ambitions would eventually sit inside. FinCEN and OFAC have a joint 2026 proposed rule implementing the GENIUS Act's AML, customer-identification, and sanctions treatment for payment stablecoins, and FinCEN has separately proposed a March 2026 whistleblower program offering 10-30% awards on collected penalties for BSA and sanctions tips. Both developments are Sentinel-fed and bear directly on any future NC-licensed stablecoin issuer under HB1029; the underlying illicit-finance analysis is routed to FIM and is surfaced here only for its regulatory-perimeter relevance to WPM's own W2 and W11 tracking.