The Bank de España welcomed the Government’s recent approval of the draft law for the digital transformation of the financial sector, which includes the creation of the regulatory and supervisory sandbox, and called for it to be complemented by other initiatives such as fintech clusters.
If this law is developed as expected, “Spain will be in a prominent position in Europe, being one of the first jurisdictions with controlled spaces to carry out tests with emerging technologies”, said Carlos Conesa, Director General of Financial Innovation at the Bank of Spain, at the opening of the ‘Madrid Capital Fintech’ cluster on Wednesday.
However, Conesa assured that the ‘sandbox’ should not be the only initiative and considered it “interesting” to complement it with other projects that are not limited by the authorities, such as ‘clusters’ “which are very valuable”.
Jorge Bardón, from ‘fintech’ Creditea, stressed that the approval of the ‘sandbox’ project is “a great step forward”, but he maintained that “it is still time to implement it” with the collaboration of public bodies and private companies.
For his part, the Madrid City Council’s councillor for entrepreneurship, employment and innovation, Ángel Niño, valued the progress made in the legal environment, which is “very necessary to guarantee that the innovative process is safe and effective and with which we join other countries at the forefront that have similar processes”.
Reflection
Later, a debate was held in which different companies from the fintech world explained the challenges facing the sector, among other issues.
Participants included Laura Boison from Bnext; Francisco Sierra from N26; Grégoire from Lestapis. de October; Jorge Bardón, from Creditea; Ana Asuero, from Aplázame; Giorgio Semenzato, from Finizens; Juan A. Balcázar, from Housers; Antonio Cantalapiedra, from Woonivers; Rodrigo Rueda, from Life Box; and Francisco Amián, from Tesoriza.
Laura Boison stressed that there is going to be a great transformation of the sector supported by digitalization and the Internet. He also pointed out that it is necessary to adapt products and services to the customer and for this, “it is necessary to know him through analysis and data management”.
From Tesoriza, Francisco Amión stressed that one of the challenges facing fintech is to make financial services, which have always been aimed at large companies, SMEs and the self-employed, accessible.
As for the banking of the future, Grégoire de Lestapis said that it would be “open, modular and tailor-made”. For his part, Bardón said that “the mobile phone is going to be the bank of the future”.
