First Data Announces European Approval Of Its BCRS

Last week, First Data Corporation, an electronic commerce and payment services company, announced that its binding corporate rules ("BCRs") for data privacy had been authorised by the Information Commissioner's Office ("ICO"). First Data is the eleventh company, and the first payment processor, to have received such authorisation.

First Data's BCRs were authorised through the mutual recognition procedure, which is an accelerated approval process. Under this procedure, once the lead authority (in this case the ICO) considers that BCRs meet the relevant requirements, other EU data protection authorities can accept this opinion as sufficient basis for providing their own authorisations. This procedure resulted in the approval of First Data's BCRs across 18 EU member states. The entire process took approximately four years to complete.