an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

The Cen­tral Bank’s long-await­ed Pay­ment Sys­tems and Ser­vices Bill is be­ing wel­comed by fin­tech op­er­a­tors as a ma­jor step to­ward mod­ernising Trinidad and To­ba­go’s fi­nan­cial sys­tem, but in­dus­try play­ers are warn­ing that parts of the leg­is­la­tion could un­der­mine the very in­no­va­tion it is try­ing to en­cour­age.
At the heart of the de­bate are con­cerns over cap­i­tal re­quire­ments, re­stric­tions on mul­ti-cur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions, the ab­sence of open bank­ing man­dates, and what fin­tech op­er­a­tors de­scribe as a lack of for­ward-look­ing pol­i­cy around blockchain and sta­ble­coins.
The draft leg­is­la­tion has trig­gered a se­ries of con­sul­ta­tions by the Cen­tral Bank over the past two weeks, in­volv­ing lo­cal and re­gion­al fin­tech com­pa­nies, pay­ment providers, and tech­nol­o­gy firms as reg­u­la­tors seek feed­back be­fore the frame­work is fi­nalised.
At the for­mal me­dia launch of the con­sul­ta­tions on Wednes­day, founder of WamNow Tech­nolo­gies Mark Pereira de­scribed the pro­posed frame­work as a sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment, but ar­gued that pol­i­cy­mak­ers were not ful­ly ac­count­ing for the pace of tech­no­log­i­cal change.
“So we do wel­come it, for sure. The one thing is, if we’re go­ing to do it, be­cause what they al­lud­ed to is some­thing they want to take us for­ward over the next five years, then we re­al­ly need to as­sess the cur­rent land­scape and do things right,” Pereira said.
“Giv­en that we have an un­prece­dent­ed ele­phant in the room, which is AI and blockchain and tech­nol­o­gy, we re­al­ly should look at this frame­work and think about the next decade and I think that’s what’s not be­ing done.”
Pereira not­ed that T&T nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly had a ded­i­cat­ed pay­ments law and ar­gued the cur­rent bill rep­re­sent­ed a ma­jor con­sol­i­da­tion of frag­ment­ed fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tions.
“We nev­er re­al­ly had a ded­i­cat­ed pay­ment law. So this Cen­tral Bank bill and these fi­nan­cial acts are con­sol­i­dat­ing every­thing in­to a mod­ern frame­work, which is a ma­jor achieve­ment mov­ing for­ward, but we def­i­nite­ly need to fu­ture-proof it.”