The Treasury Secretariat posted a guide to make the presentation of projects easier. The selected projects will be known by November or December.
Spain’s Fintech sandbox has already set the date for its second call. The General Secretariat of the Treasury and International Financing recently posted a resolution in which it highlights that it will start to receive nominations on September 1.
According to the document published by the agency, the process will be completely open until October 23 of this year. The initiatives that register will need to have the degree of maturity necessary to start operating immediately, exactly as it happened in the premiere opening.
To ensure that these and other requirements are in line, there is also a release of a guide to facilitate project submission. The new guide indicates that, in addition to explaining the potential advantages for users, the participants in the sandbox will need to explain in detail their goals, their test systems, and the technology that will take place in such procedures, including the entities that will take part on it as well as risks of the project might imply.
There is also a request about the regulations on data protection and prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing, currently active in Europe. The goal of this guide is to avoid the deficiencies that were observed in some candidates who registered for the first call.
Mónica Rodríguez, head of the Regulatory Sandbox at Blue Innovation, a consulting firm specializing in the financial sector, told the media that almost a third of the projects presented lacked the necessary level of detail. She recalled that even some projects that were very well prepared received a series of rejections from the regulators in the first call.
Rejected Projects can be Re-enrolled
During the first round of the sandbox -which was open from January 13 to February 23, 2021- the Treasury Secretariat only accepted 18 projects, out of a total of 67 proposals that were submitted.
The proposals went through analysis by the Bank of Spain, the General Directorate of Insurance and Pension Funds, and the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV). Some projects received were immature, some were poorly presented, and others were deemed too ambitious, Rodríguez said.
In this sense, the evaluating entities offered reasoned arguments to the rejected projects. The entities argued that they have served to correct errors, and will allow some of them to be submitted to the second call with the option of being approved if this time they meet all the requirements.
Nine of the supported startups are related to cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Selected initiatives also include platforms for payment with crypto assets, digital identity, and solutions based on distributed ledgers.
At the present, supported initiatives are developing contribution protocols with supervisors in their field. The Law of Digital Transformation of the Financial System sets a maximum period of three months to set these mechanisms to action.
The greatest workload is in the Bank of Spain, which has ten of the approved projects under actual supervision, while the CNMV and the General Directorate of Insurance and Pension Funds supervise the other 8.
By: Jenson Nuñez
