Payments industry leaders have called on the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to take a "graduated" approach to payment regulation, to ease the entry of new companies into the market and to facilitate collaboration between established players and new entrants.A payments industry panel at the ASIC Annual Forum agreed that regulation should start with a very light touch for start-ups operating in a regulatory "sandbox", and then move through various graduated stages that encouraged the development of innovative businesses.Ripple Asia Pacific managing director Dilip Rao said ASIC needed to recognise that start-ups had difficulty getting funding. Regulation should not make that more difficult.PayPal Australia vice president Libby Roy said regulation needed to cover emerging technologies in mobile, NFC and other areas.Roy said: "We want to innovate but we have to maintain our value proposition, which is the protection of people's funds."Institutions need to show they will set high standards for their businesses. When they do that there is an opportunity for some relaxation of the regulations."Rao said it was important for regulators to give certainty about the environment for infrastructure development, so that innovations such as distributed ledger could proceed."Regulators need to work together as much as possible, to create similarities among the regimes in different countries."We don't think there is going to be one distributed ledger. There could be millions. What we need is standards that allow for interoperability between them."