{{news.date}}
{{news.source}}
{{news.type}}
Ben Johnson has provided contentious and regulatory advice to clients in the banking and finance sector for over 25 years. He has acted for many of the UK’s clearing banks, financial firms, payment institutions and major corporates on a wide range of financial services disputes, often with a particular focus on fraud, cyber and data.
Ben specialises in all contentious, risk advisory and documentation aspects of payment systems, including payment processing, card acquiring/issuing, e-money, wallets and card schemes. He advises on such matters as payments regulation (such as revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), interchange fee regulation and strong customer authentication), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and data breaches, card scheme rules, new card technologies and card scheme structures/programmes.
Ben advises both financial services (FS) and non-FS clients regularly on cybersecurity and data loss matters, acting on investigations and data privacy litigation deriving from data breaches in a number of high-profile incidents.
- Advising a major UK consumer-facing business in respect of Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) obligations/reporting, data subject access requests (DSARs), breach management, forensics, remediation and subsequent complex litigation from many thousands of claimants following a significant data breach affecting over 1 million customers.
- Acting in fraud actions derived from phishing, cyberattacks, payment account misdirection, fraudulent misuse of payment processing facilities, misrepresentation, cheque fraud, direct debit scheme fraud and others.
- Acting in the leading UK card acquiring disputes, involving fraud, human rights claims and money laundering issues.
- Advising a major UK card acquirer following the world’s largest compromise of card data at a major merchant. Involved advising on contract liability, potential adverse publicity and the fine regimes of the major card schemes.
- Acting on multijurisdictional matters, such as cross-border injunctions following a major direct debit fraud, asset tracing following equipment fraud and fresh-air invoicing, as well as providing global regulatory advice.
- Advising on mass claims derived from Consumer Credit Act section 75 (CCA 75) claims, test-cases, data privacy litigation and mis-selling, including group litigation orders.
- Acting for banks defending claims for race discrimination following steps taken to close accounts for sanctions/anti-money laundering (AML) or other legitimate reasons.
- Leading an investigation into serious data loss, including witness interview and remediation advice on policies, processes and contracts together with analysis of best data security practice.
Education
- University of Northumbria, LL.B. (Hons.), 1998
Admissions
- England and Wales, 2000
- Recognised for Banking Litigation by Chambers UK
- Ranked for Dispute Resolution – Banking Litigation by The Legal 500 UK
- Co-author, Data Protection and Compliance (Second Edition), October 2021.