COLOMBIA

On January 15, the Bank of the Republic (BanRep in Spanish) launched a public consultation to regulate the minimum individual solvency conditions for open market operators (OMA). The entity also circulated for consultation a draft measure regulating the clearing and settlement of dollar sales/purchase operations in central counterparty risk chambers. Both consultations closed January 21. The final versions of the documents are expected to be published in the upcoming weeks.

The first draft is intended to complement the entry and maintenance requirements to be met by OMA placement agents also operating as credit establishments. The measure includes special financial institutions with individual and consolidated leverage. Thus, the adherence to the Basel III regulatory capital framework, adopted by the Colombian Ministry of Finance, will be taken as a prudential regulation mechanism. 

The second document establishes that BanRep intervention operations on the foreign exchange market dollar sales//purchases, as well as the fulfillment of spot dollar sales or the forward purchases of dollars may be carried out in a foreign exchange compensation and liquidation system (SCL, for its acronym in Spanish) or through a central counterparty risk chamber (CRCC). In this way, initial and final transactions for the sale of dollars can be sent to an SCL or a CRCC on the day of their respective fulfillment, as if they were spot transactions.