While in Europe the debate on open finance progresses through directives, Chile has been applying a regulation for three years that covers in a single text what in other jurisdictions is divided among several. The Law 21.521, known as the Fintech Law, was enacted in December 2022 and its implementation has been staggered over the following years. By 2026, with the mandatory registration already operational, it has become the regional reference for any team building financial products in the area.
For the Spanish market, the interest is not anecdotal. A significant number of payment companies operating on both sides of the Atlantic are replicating compliance structures designed for this framework.
What Law 21.521 Introduces
The declared objective of the regulation is to promote competition and financial inclusion through technological innovation. To achieve this, it articulates three components.
The first is a licensing system that subjects the main actors in the ecosystem to the supervision of the Commission for the Financial Market. Crowdfunding platforms, alternative transaction systems, credit and investment advisory, custody, and intermediation of financial instruments fall within the perimeter.
The second is a regulatory sandbox, that is, a controlled environment where products can be tested with requirements proportional to the risk before entering the open market.
The third, and the most ambitious, is the Open Finance System. The CMF has already published the regulations that govern it, and its practical effect is that financial service providers can exchange customer information, with consent, to offer products based on that data. It is the functional equivalent of European open banking, with its own timeline.
From Regulatory Framework to Instant Payment
The visible consequence of all this for the end user is not in the articles, but in the speed. When the data exchange infrastructure and the payment infrastructure mature simultaneously, the time between an order and its crediting is no longer measured in business days.
This change has reordered competition in entire sectors of digital services. In e-commerce, it has ceased to be a differentiator and has become a requirement. In on-demand work platforms, it has become a recruitment argument. And in online entertainment, where the user evaluates the reliability of a service by the speed with which they recover their money, it has transformed into the dominant comparison criterion: Chilean listings of betting houses with quick withdrawals rank the offerings by actual crediting times and by the means that allow it, from bank transfers and CuentaRUT to electronic wallets, in a market that also operates without a local license and where responsible gambling is a pertinent warning.
The interesting technical detail is that none of those times depend on the service provider. They depend on the payment rail underneath, and that is why a financial regulation ends up determining the experience of sectors that are not financial.
What the Spanish Market Can Learn
The comparison with the second European Payment Services Directive leaves two fundamental differences.
The first is scope. While the European regulation focused on payment accounts, the Chilean one included from the outset credit products, insurance, and pensions within the perimeter of open finance. The scope is broader and also more demanding to implement. For the user, the counterpart lies in consent: it is important to know what information is actually provided when registering on an application or a website, because the exchange of data between entities relies on that authorization.
The second is sequence. Chile published the law and then defined the technical regulations in stages, with deadlines that have been adjusted. Europe did the opposite: very detailed technical standards from the beginning, with a slower actual adoption than expected.
Neither of the two paths is evidently superior. But for those designing financial products, the Chilean lesson is that mandatory registration, and not the law itself, is the moment when the framework starts to bite. That point has already arrived.
You may also like
