On April15, Minister of Finance Felipe Larraín announced that a bill is to be introduced to Congress seeking to regulate financial technologies within the year. The technologies to be regulated include collective financing platforms and cryptoactives. The Executive branch aims to diminish the risks of these platforms in order to promote their development and technological innovation in the sector. For this purpose, the bill will be based on the principles of proportionality, technological neutrality and flexibility. According to the minister, the ultimate objective will be to provide legal certainty for technological advances in the sector and to position Chile as a regional financial hub.

The minister explained that “to promote safe innovation in the financial sector”, the bill will adhere to three principles. The first will be proportionality, which implies that enhanced security requirements will be demanded of technologies with greater disruptive potential. The second will be technology neutrality, which concerns preventing the development of regulatory asymmetries between traditional institutions and those that use technologies intensively. Flexibility, the third and last principle, is about creating regulations that can adapt to technological advances and so avoid becoming obsolete.

Cryptoactives and collective financing platforms stand out among the technologies that the Executive plans to regulate. In both cases, the aim is to provide legal certainty to these technological platforms and to mitigate the risks associated with their use. Larraín explained that, to be able to introduce the bill this year, the Ministry of Finance will redouble its work with the Central Bank of Chile, the Commission for the Financial Market (CMF) and the Financial Analysis Unit (UAF). These entities are also set to establish working groups in conjunction with the private sector with a view to informing the future bill.