The attendees included a range of leaders—with FIs largely represented by chief digital officers and directors of digital channels—and Fintechs represented primarily by principals—these leaders have already begun the journey toward open banking.
One of the panels entitled, “LATAM Fintech Ecosystem,” highlighted how new PSPs must collaborate with banks in order to build a strong ecosystem focused on the final customer experience and offer them innovative technologies that will accelerate new services acceptance. The discussion also covered the relevance of new players in this ecosystem such as universities, merchants, and billers, all of which possess considerable payments intelligence.
Mexico, a LatAm Fintech leader, passed the Fintech Law in 2018 to regulate financial technology institutions. However, up until now, the discussions have been around understanding the impact of the law and the challenges faced in the last year.
Another panel entitled, “Looking into the future of Open Banking,” spotlighted the challenges related to fraud prevention and how consumers can secure their digital identity – an online or networked identity adopted or claimed in cyberspace by an individual, organization or electronic device – and maintain their digital reputation, especially while much of the population is unbanked due to trust issues. The digital reputation would be derived from additional consumer habits through eCommerce, internet of things and alternate payment methods, using analytics to build effective actionable intelligence to protect legitimate consumers from fraud.
As the event concluded, one of the main challenges that banks and fintechs have is to properly communicate and educate their customers—borrowing from what the UK has accomplished with the introduction of the new services in every UK bank’s website.
Post-event, we are now awaiting the winners of the emerging open banking world, who will be those players willing to change, collaborate and develop better and more reliable products and services, and for a lower cost.
Payments hub 
