Digital wallets, which have seen an explosive boom in recent years, are still under the watchful eye of the Central Bank. The entity’s board of directors will today analyze a new regulation which they say aims to “avoid fraud”. “It’s not about banning anything, it’s about enforcing the same know-your-customer rules that banks have to follow today,” they said.

It is not yet confirmed whether the settlement will be finalized today at the institution’s board meeting, but publication is said to be imminent. The leak of this new central offensive has caused a stir in the fintech sector, which fears that the new regulations will prevent it from competing on equal terms with the rest of the financial system.

The latest precedent in this area is worrying. At the end of the year, the head of the BCRA, Miguel Pesce, decided that all customer cash remaining in the wallets must be 100% deposited. It was a measure that put a lot of pressure on the costs of companies, which had previously taken advantage of this liquidity to invest in the banks themselves. From the Central, they indicated that keeping this money in view represents a “systemic danger”. However, many saw this measure as strong pressure from the banks themselves to limit the growth of the fintech sector.

“We have to adjust the procedures because we detect a lot of fraud. Also, not all wallets have at boarding similar, it will be necessary to evaluate on a case-by-case basis”, they warn at the BCRA

Although details have yet to be released, one of the main axes of the BCRA will focus on the whole relationship that links digital accounts to bank accounts. As they explained, many cases of fraud have been detected by wallet customers linking their virtual accounts to that of a bank and withdrawing money without permission. One of the great advances of recent years has precisely been the total interoperability between virtual accounts (CVU) and bank accounts (CBU). We will see if this type of immediate and unlimited operations are in danger. Some banks were already imposing barriers to such transactions, even though regulation, at least until now, put them on a level playing field. The “excuse” of several entities was precisely the impossibility of knowing the counterpart of the operation.

Similarly, the primary form of funding available to wallet clients is transfers from their bank accounts. This type of operation is now under the supervision of the Centrale.

“We have to adjust the procedures because we detect a lot of fraud. Also, not all wallets have at boarding Likewise, it will have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.“, they warn. It means that The Central Bank will monitor how customers register in each case, verifying that the process of onboarding new users meets all the requirements demanded for the entire financial system.

The central wallet offensive is not new. Although all of them are already under the institution’s orbit as payment service providers (PSPs), the entity has tightened its regulation of fintech. By the end of the year, he had defined that customers’ cash should be 100% deposited

Although many see this central offensive as a direct attack on Mercado Pago, Mercado Libre’s digital wallet, in reality, the regulations affect all fintech players equally. In addition, in recent months, the participation of crypto wallets has also increased, which offer the possibility of saving and investing in cryptocurrencies, but also customers can obtain a prepaid card to make purchases in the “world real”.

On the other hand, the BCRA itself was instrumental in launching the Transfers 3.0 system, which allows immediate transactions between accounts. It was also the backbone of QR code interoperability, which essentially allows you to pay from any wallet, bank or digital, by scanning any other company’s QR in the corresponding store.

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