In an attempt to “promote financial stability and prevent money laundering”, Mexico has cleared the penultimate hurdle to passing a bill which conceives of a regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies and ICOs.
This week, Mexico’s lower house of Congress gave the rubber stamp of approval to the bill which had already been accepted by the Mexico’s Senate in December last year.
The one remaining step required to make it law is for the document to be officially signed by the country’s President Enrique Pena Nieto.
Generalised Framework
According to Reuters, the far-reaching document which encompasses the entire field of financial technology will provide “greater regulatory certainty around issues such as crowdfunding, payment methods and rules surrounding cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.”
Although so-called secondary laws are still to be drafted, the current bill will address fundamental issues around open banking such as personal information data sharing among financial institutions – a hot issue in a country that continues to suffer from embedded corruption and drugs-related money-laundering.
Francisco Mere, president of the association Fintech Mexico, believes the bill asserts “that the information in the hands of the financial institutions is the property of the user, not the institution, and that it can be brought to other financial intermediaries.”
Under this law, providing users give their authorisation, established small to medium institutions and startups would be able to use the information held by large banks through permissioned public application programming interfaces (APIs).
These Mexican legal regulations relating to cryptocurrency, although further advanced than many countries, are still written in general terms and specifics are expected to be added at a later date by the three key entities of the banking and securities regulator CNBV, the central bank and the finance ministry.
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