1. The Member States or competent authorities
shall require a payment institution which provides payment services as
referred to in points (1) to (6) of Annex I to safeguard all funds which
have been received from the payment service users or through another
payment service provider for the execution of payment transactions, in
either of the following ways:
(a) funds shall not be commingled at any
time with the funds of any natural or legal person other than payment
service users on whose behalf the funds are held and, where they are
still held by the payment institution and not yet delivered to the payee
or transferred to another payment service provider by the end of the
business day following the day when the funds have been received, they
shall be deposited in a separate account in a credit institution or
invested in secure, liquid low-risk assets as defined by the competent
authorities of the home Member State; and they shall be insulated in
accordance with national law in the interest of the payment service
users against the claims of other creditors of the payment institution,
in particular in the event of insolvency;
(b) funds shall be covered by an insurance
policy or some other comparable guarantee from an insurance company or a
credit institution, which does not belong to the same group as the
payment institution itself, for an amount equivalent to that which would
have been segregated in the absence of the insurance policy or other
comparable guarantee, payable in the event that the payment institution
is unable to meet its financial obligations.
2. Where a payment institution is required to
safeguard funds under paragraph 1 and a portion of those funds is to be
used for future payment transactions with the remaining amount to be
used for non-payment services, that portion of the funds to be used for
future payment transactions shall also be subject to the requirements of
paragraph 1. Where that portion is variable or not known in advance,
Member States shall allow payment institutions to apply this paragraph
on the basis of a representative portion assumed to be used for payment
services provided such a representative portion can be reasonably
estimated on the basis of historical data to the satisfaction of the
competent authorities.
