The Sandbox of the Fintech sector arrives in Spain

As a first meaning, the word sandbox translated into Spanish means literally sandbox or sandbox, that park place where children can play inside a delimited space full of sand. However, nowadays the term has been adapted to new meanings and in the sectors related to technology and innovation, a sandbox supposes a space of tests delimited with a regulation or special legislation where the companies can make tests of new projects.

In the case of the Fintech sector, the Ministry of Economy and the CNMV are working together to implement an action framework with special regulation that allows the development of fintech operations and innovations without being subject to the regulations of traditional banking. Thus, this "field of evidence" reflects a legal environment delimited to perform business tests in the financial technology sector, avoiding sanctions and that companies have to wait for the general legislation to be regulated.

In Europe we have the United Kingdom as a reference, it was the first country to be aware of the legal limitations fintech had when launching innovation and development projects. For this main reason, the United Kingdom has been the European country where more fintech initiatives have been carried out, because they know that it is a booming sector and want to continue promoting its progress. Its regulatory sandbox was proposed in 2015 and launched in 2016 when it detected the structural rigidity of financial legislation, something that did not match the dynamism and evolution of the new Fintech startups that offered solutions similar to those of banks but with greater innovation and that they worked practically without regulating.

In this sense, the objectives of this measure in Spain are not other than to stimulate and promote a sector in constant evolution such as fintech, promote competition in the financial sector and eventually develop a legislative framework based on the experiences, learning of what has been done over time and based on real cases.

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