Costa Rica

The Americas awards research cycle has now begun – don’t miss out on this opportunity to get recognised

Research for the 2022 IFLR Americas Awards has now begun, with winners to be announced on May 12 2022

For the past two decades, technology has permeated the financial services market. Developing countries such as Costa Rica and its neighbours are being favoured by these emerging fintech startups. Entrepreneurs are focusing on developing financial tech tools in areas such as lending, payments, alternative scoring, data management, digital banking, personal finance management and crowfunding in order to offer a varied and accessible range of services for different market segments.

Lisa Viscidi, programme director at the Inter-American Dialogue, looks at the pro-investment sentiment sweeping across Latin America

The OECD has established policies to support cooperation between jurisdictions in order to solve common problems. Among these is the exchange of financial information to reduce problems such as tax evasion and avoidance, and money laundering. This situation has been a challenge for central American jurisdictions when it comes to the approval of new regulations. As a result, several international treaties have been signed and local regulations have been enacted, and several other initiatives and bills are currently being discussed from a political and technical perspective.

A first on many fronts, this issuance will allow the concessionaire company to tap national and international markets

Silvia Canales The regulatory dynamics affecting companies that run their businesses in sectors under the inspection and surveillance of a regulatory and supervisory authority, require an understanding of a multiplicity of rules of different levels and sources. Those rules, promoted by the different regulators, are aimed at ensuring that the businesses are developed with a high level of public interest in mind.

In the aftermath of the 2009 global financial crisis, international financial regulatory bodies such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision scrambled for answers to one key question: what caused the crisis. Although there were many causes, regulators uniformly concluded that a lack of sound corporate governance practices was one of the root causes of the crisis. It was said that boards of directors that were asleep at the helm, so-called runaway CEOs, figurehead audit and risk committees, and a lack of checks on moral hazard, were to blame for many of the problems.