The interest of technological platforms dedicated to financial services in operating under the law to Regulate Financial Technology Institutions, or Fintech Lawhas not decreased but on the contrary has increased in the last year despite the fact that there are still pending secondary rules to land and the regulator does not give light signals to resolve the requests in process.
According to a transparency request, since the enactment of the law to date, 139 platforms have submitted their request to be authorized, of which 90 are Institutions of Electronic Payment Funds (IFPE) and 49 of Crowdfunding (IFC), which are the two main figures covered by the regulations.
This figure is higher than the National Baking and Stock Commission (CNBV) reported in January 2021, when it indicated that up to that date it had received 93 applications to organize as Financial Technology Institutions, of which 59 were IFPE and 34 IFC.
In other words, from January 2021 until a few days ago, 46 firms submitted their application in order to be authorized to operate under the terms of the law, of which 31 submitted their papers to operate as IFPE and 15 as IFC.
Regarding the new models, which are those that seek to carry out a reserved activity through technology and that require a temporary authorization to test the functionality of their scheme, the request details that since the publication of the law until a few days ago eight applications have been submitted to operate from non-financial entities and only one entered by an institution that is already supervised by the CNBV.
Rejections also grow
Currently, there are 33 platforms authorized to operate under the Fintech Law, of which 19 are IFPE and 14 IFC. However, since the publication of the regulations in the Official Journal of the Federation (DOF) until a few days ago, there have also been rejections of authorization requests by the authority.
According to the information request, the authority has rejected or denied 25 applications, of which 17 have been for firms seeking to operate as IFPE and eight as IFC. Likewise, it has rejected, because they were not appropriate, two applications to operate as electronic payment fund platforms.
It is expected that by the end of the year, there will be about 60 platforms authorized to operate under the terms of the Fintech Law, if the regulator begins to speed up the process.
Normative slopes
Since the arrival of Jesús de la Fuente Rodríguez to the presidency of the CNBV, on October 28, 2021, 13 definitive authorizations of platforms that have received the endorsement to operate under the terms of the Fintech Law have been published in the DOF.
However, none of these 13 authorizations has come out with the signature of the current president, but rather the previous one, Juan Pablo Graf Noriega, which indicates that the files already had a significant degree of progress and even that they only had to meet certain requirements to have the final endorsement.
In this context, there is also a significant delay regarding secondary rules of the regulations, such as those related to the open finance model (open finance) contemplated in the law, which would oblige more than 2,200 financial entities, and other players such as the Big Tech, to the exchange of data with each other to create more personalized services and products.
“On the subject of open finance we are further behind than we should have been. Mexico was an innovator, a spearhead, but the secondary provisions of transactional data, which is where the meat of open finance is, has taken a long time to come out” commented Rocío Robles Peiro, partner of the Tenet Consultores firm and one of the people, who, as part of the CNBV at the time, was more involved in the creation of the law.
The open finance model contemplated in the fintech law provides for the sharing of three types of data: open financial, aggregated and transactional, the latter referring to the behavior of a user, as long as the latter grants their endorsement so that their information can be shared.
So far, the authority has only issued the secondary rules regarding the sharing of ATM information and although at the end of last year, a project was already advanced regarding the secondary rules of transactional data, the current authorities have put the brakes on and there is fear in the industry that this year they will not come out either, despite the fact that the law provided for it for more than a year.
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