Digital financial architecture increases in Colombia

Although by May 2015 the number of financial transactions through the non-face-to-face channels of the entities equaled those carried out in person, it was not until June 2021 when the amount of said operations was equal to one and another channel and from that moment on the non-face-to-face channel has only increased.

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This is showing how financial digitalization is moving at an accelerated pace and today there are practically no requests for financial licenses for entities with offices and expensive physical operations in several cities in the country.

The march towards digital is evident in the fact that before the Financial Superintendency, according to senior sources in the sector, There are 16 applications for licenses, especially for banks, financing companies, as well as insurance.

One of them is Revolut, a British digital bank that has 45 million customers, is in 38 countries, which carried out 500 million transactions in August alone and which tomorrow will announce its arrival in Colombia as a bank, although it must wait for authorization from the Superfinanciera.

This digital financial entity wants to start by bringing remittances to Colombia for free in amounts of up to US$200 thanks to its presence in the countries from which the bulk of these incomes of Colombian workers come: that is, the United States, Spain, Chile, the United Kingdom and Mexico.

These digital and fintech financial entities have created strong competition for the traditional financial system because They are offering speed, efficiency, innovation and lower costs and commissions.

But in the rise of financial digitalization in Colombia, there is an important problem and it is related to a fact that Portafolio revealed in recent days and that was not liked by the Government, the financial system, the fintech ecosystem and the Bank of the Republic and was the revelation of a large survey of the Issuer that has been carried out every two years, and which showed that the use of cash in Colombia has not decreased as much as expected despite all the factors mentioned.

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One of the most important indicators of said survey shows that Colombians continue to largely use cash as a payment instrument (77.8% in number and 78.6% in value).
In the survey two years ago it was mentioned that in number it was 78.4% and in value it was 74.6%.

New financial architecture

The Financial Superintendent, César Ferrari recently said that the factors driving the growth of digital channels have been the Covid 19 pandemic that accustomed people to using digital channels, greater access to the internet than in the physical sphere There are 9 million people covered and 44.9 million on mobile phones and also with 83.3 million mobile (cellular) telephone lines.

He also said that the use of the Internet from any device exceeds on average 77% of the population over 5 years old, although with differences since at the urban level it is 82% and in rural areas it is 56%.
Regarding access to devices, the use of a computer (desktop, laptop or tablet) is 34.1% of people aged 5 years and older (with 39% in urban areas and 16% in rural areas).

Likewise, he pointed out that cell phone use is 90.4% in people over 5 years of age (92% urban and 83% rural).

Ferrari said that in the country there are challenges such as gaps in financial inclusion, such as the fact that in the rural population there is 65% access to financial products and even more worrying is the fact that credit reaches only 35% of the population (a figure that has practically remained constant over time).

And derived from the above, he mentioned that microcredit (used by the poor and vulnerable population) barely represents 2.8% of the total portfolio.

The Superfinanciero trusted that the advances in financial digitalization will deepen with the use of digital applications and virtual branches, the use of digital wallets and low-amount deposits, the opening of products from digital channels, the implementation of the immediate payment system executed by the Bank of the Republic.

Likewise, he said that fintech companies must continue to offer digital products such as personal loans, work is being done to implement the open finance model that will promote greater competition between entities for customer profiling to give them access to more and new products. and services.

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For Professor César Ferrari, Financial Superintendent, what the new financial architecture implies is closely related to analytics and Big Data (large data packages), Artificial Intelligence, robotics, cloud computing, the Internet of Things. things, the distributed registry (Blockchain), behavioral biometrics, open finance, digital supervision such as the one the entity will undertake.

Holman Rodriguez