Banking commissioner seeks examiners for merchant-acquirer charters, proposes faster backups and limited AI tools

Beau Fears, Commissioner of the Department of Banking and Finance, told the subcommittee Georgia’s merchant-acquirer limited-purpose charters have attracted large payment processors and require tailored oversight. “It permits payment processors to have direct access to the card networks, be it Visa or Mastercard without having to go through a bank sponsor,” Fears said, noting Fiserv has a charter in operation and Stripe and checkout.com have been approved.

Fears asked for funding to add two merchant-acquirer limited-purpose bank examiners to supervise these novel entities and said the charters require companies to maintain a Georgia presence and at least 50 employees. He also requested a modern data-backup solution after describing routine backup tests that typically fail and a restoration timeframe under the proposed new system of “less than 4 hours” to recover material systems instead of weeks.

On automated software, Fears described a narrowly scoped AI tool that the department would use without exposing confidential data to public models. “We can’t use those AI solutions that learn off of the data such as CHAT GPT,” he said; the proposed in-house solution would automate low-risk tasks and help produce internal and external reports.

Committee members offered no substantive objections during this presentation; the commissioner said he was available to answer follow-up questions.

Next steps: the department will seek committee support to add examiners and funding for backups and limited AI automation during budget reconciliation.