The Fintech continue to grow in the global financial market. Its main characteristics – impact, innovation and competition – have made this industry take more strength every day. That is why it is expected that this year its prominence will be greater and that it will continue to revolutionize the market.
The high demand
“Every time there is a much higher demand and new services and products continue to increase. This is because people are looking for fast and quality options, opting for digital over traditional” explains José Santomingo, president of the Fintech Business Association of Chile (FinteChile).
“The Fintech have managed to create a revolution in the competition and efficiency of the financial market, thus achieving an optimization of the industry, which increasingly knows that they have to improve their standards” he adds.
In this line, Santomingo indicates that this year will be key for the industry.
Four hot spots that must be watched:
- Regulation: In February of this year, the Commission for the Financial Market (CMF) presented the White Paper with the general guidelines to regulate Fintech companies. The document, according to the president of the association, “clearly marked the first guidelines to regulate the market. We, like FinteChile, have already delivered our comments to the agency and hope that they will be taken into account in order to achieve a regulation that contributes significantly to the financial inclusion of the country with the support of FinTech”.
- Open Banking: Recently, the association announced with Open Vector the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU, for its acronym in English) to promote Open Banking, or Open Banking, in the country. “Open Banking is the future of financial services in the world, and if Chile aspires to be the Financial HUB of Latin America, it should start to implement it before”, says Santomingo.
- Transformation of means of payment: Although the great reference of the transformation of the means of payment are the Nordic countries, where they set as a goal to “disappear” the paper money for the year 2030, in Chile is living an important transformation of the payment ecosystem, in which FinTech will be a relevant player given its speed to develop and implement new solutions.
- Cryptocurrencies: As happened last year, in 2019 the cryptoactives will continue in the financial world, especially due to the problems they have had with traditional banking. “We hope that with the regulation, these problems that we have had change and we realize that innovation is the future,” said Santomingo.