I wish you an enjoyable and productive day, and give the floor to President Jean-Claude Trichet. BIS Review 28/2008  3
Following a public consultation process, its final version is about to be published and we expect it to be a relevant contribution to the development and updating of our retail payments market. The new regulations not only set the prudential requirements for non-bank prepaid card issuers. It also narrows down the scope of regulated entities dealing with the processing of transactions, and changes their capital requirements, aiming to facilitate the entrance of new participants to the acquiring and processing business. By removing requirements that may be burdensome for small entities, and by considering explicitly the possibility of non-physical payment cards, as well as remote purchase and acquiring, we expect to see the retail payments market in Chile taking a new shape in the near future. That almost certainly would involve—and perhaps require—and active participation of FinTech entities. These features give some ground for optimism on the potential contribution of FinTech not only to the democratization of financial services but also to price and financial stability and development in Chile. Ladies and gentlemen, A few blocks from where we are gathering today, on Regent St. and Park Terrace was the bank branch where I opened my checking account as a Cambridge student. There I was handed my first debit card, which I could use to withdraw cash from the automatic teller outside. Coming from a country where banks were places where people lined up in front of a human cashier to perform basic banking transactions, these seemed enormous changes to me.