FinteChile attacks CMF's Open Finance delays as world's slowest implementation

On Tuesday, Chile's fintech industry association released a sharp rebuke of the central bank regulator's decision to push back the launch of the country's Open Finance System. The delay, they argued, would make Chile the slowest nation on earth to implement this kind of financial infrastructure—a distinction that carries real consequences for millions of people locked out of formal credit.

The regulatory authority, the CMF, had just announced modifications to the rules governing the Sistema de Finanzas Abiertas, or SFA. The changes extend the system's launch by a full year, moving it from 2025 to July 2027. But that's only the beginning of the timeline problem. Because the law itself mandates a gradual rollout, FinteChile calculated that the system won't reach full operational capacity until 2030. That means between six and seven years will have elapsed since the Fintech Law was published in January 2023. By comparison, the United Kingdom built and launched its equivalent system in 1.3 years. Brazil did it in 1.5. Chile, the association warned, would become the world's slowest implementer of this solution.

The industry group identified three specific problems with the new regulatory framework. First, the delay itself—an additional twelve months piled on top of the twenty-four already built into the original timeline. Second, the way the regulator had redefined the backup mechanism that the original law explicitly required. The Fintech Law had mandated an independent secondary channel to keep the system running if the primary APIs failed. The new rules, however, defined the backup as merely the main system operating in a contingency mode—essentially the same infrastructure in a different configuration. For FinteChile, this gutted the whole point. It meant the system's reliability would depend entirely on how robust the incumbent banks' internal systems were, with no truly independent safeguard. Third, the pilot program structure added eight months of additional delay by requiring two months of operation without any enforceable service standards, followed by six months with weakened ones. Each stage would be pushed back by these same eight months, raising serious questions about whether the system would actually be fully operational when the law said it should be.

The association anchored its argument in concrete numbers. Central Bank data showed that real bank lending in Chile had been contracting for four years. Consumer credit still hadn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Into that gap flowed informal credit—four billion dollars a year, moving through networks that touched more than six hundred thousand people. The interest rates in that shadow market could reach ten percent per day. These loans often came with ties to organized crime. Meanwhile, in the small business sector, forty-six percent of Chilean SMEs identified access to financing as their single biggest barrier to growth, according to a 2024 survey. The Open Finance System, FinteChile argued, would change that equation. It would let fintechs and other non-bank lenders access the data they needed to compete with traditional banks. Every year of delay meant SMEs would keep borrowing on worse terms than a functioning system would allow.

The association also sounded a regional alarm. Latin America was the fastest-growing fintech market in the world, expanding at a compound annual rate of forty-three percent between 2021 and 2025—more than double the growth rates in Europe or North America. Each delay, FinteChile warned, eroded Chile's competitive advantage and handed that potential to faster-moving economies in the region.

The group did acknowledge that the new rules incorporated genuine technical improvements. The framework included better testing environments, expanded historical data access for participating institutions, and refinements to how that data would be updated. These gains reflected more than a hundred technical sessions between the industry, regulators, and other market participants. But FinteChile was clear: those improvements didn't justify the timeline. The technical advances shouldn't translate into postponing when the system actually starts working, and they certainly shouldn't result in regulatory choices that could undermine its competitiveness or operational viability.

The CMF, in a written response, defended the extension by pointing to the sheer complexity of the infrastructure required and the need for sufficient time to coordinate with other institutions, align international security standards, introduce more gradual implementation phases, run proper testing and pilot programs, and give institutions with different operational realities time to adapt. The regulator's tone was defensive but optimistic—the delay didn't change the direction or the commitment to the project, only ensured it would be built right. The system, the CMF wrote, represented a structural transformation of Chile's financial system, and they were advancing with responsibility and without pause. But for an industry watching competitors in other countries already operating, the message landed differently: another year of waiting, another year of people turning to loan sharks, another year of small businesses struggling to grow.