Ask a founder why they grouped Chile, Colombia and Peru into one launch plan and the answer is almost always Spanish. That is a marketing observation, not a regulatory one. The three countries run separate supervisors with separate registers, separate conduct regimes, and local payment systems that only work for a locally incorporated merchant. The integration that exists sits at the market level rather than the licensing level, and it does not passport a broker licence the way the European regime does.
Chile: the CMF and a single supervisor model
Chile consolidated its financial supervision into the Comisión para el Mercado Financiero, the CMF, which now supervises banks, insurers, securities issuers and the intermediaries in the securities market. Chile also brought fintech activity into a registration framework, with categories covering crowdfunding platforms, alternative trading systems, order routing, custody and financial advice, and an authorisation process where the requirements scale to the activity and the risk carried. That framework matters to a trading firm because order routing and intermediation of instruments for Chilean clients are the kind of activities the regime was written to capture.
What it does not do is create a friendly retail CFD licence. A firm that wants to intermediate for Chilean residents needs to establish whether its product falls inside a registrable activity and then either register or stop targeting the market. The CMF, like most supervisors, maintains public registers and publishes alerts about entities operating without authorisation. Any client can check, and increasingly they do, which is why we wrote how to check a broker licence in the first place.
Colombia: two bodies, not one
Colombia is where founders most often misread the structure. The Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia supervises the financial system and authorises the entities that may intermediate in the securities market. Alongside it sits the Autorregulador del Mercado de Valores, the AMV, a self regulatory body that certifies the individuals who work in the market and enforces conduct rules against them. So a Colombian intermediary carries an institutional authorisation and its staff carry personal certifications, and both can be checked.
Colombia also has a long history of enforcement against unauthorised deposit taking and mass fundraising, which colours how the authorities read any offshore firm collecting money from Colombian residents. The safest reading is the plain one: offering leveraged trading accounts to Colombian retail clients from an offshore entity is not something a Colombian licence is quietly covering, and the entity should expect to be treated as unauthorised if it is examined.
Peru: the SMV and the banking supervisor
Peru splits the job. The Superintendencia del Mercado de Valores, the SMV, supervises the securities market, its issuers and its intermediaries, with the sociedades agentes de bolsa as the licensed broker category. The Superintendencia de Banca, Seguros y AFP supervises banks, insurers and pension funds, and it carries the anti money laundering supervision that a payments partner will care about. As in Chile and Colombia, a firm needs to establish which register its activity belongs on before it advertises, and the regulator publishes warnings about entities it considers unauthorised.
Regulatory summaries age badly. Each of these three regimes has changed within recent years. Treat this as orientation and take counsel in each country before you accept clients there.
The payment rails decide the business case
This is where the three markets diverge sharply from an operator's point of view. Each has a domestic rail that dominates: bank transfer flows initiated through the local online banking button in Colombia, the local card and transfer ecosystem in Chile, and bank plus wallet combinations in Peru. Every one of those rails is contracted through a locally regulated payment provider, and every one of those providers runs know your business checks before it will onboard a merchant.
| Question the reviewer asks | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Is the merchant locally incorporated with a tax identifier? | Whether local rails are available at all |
| Which merchant category code fits the product? | Scheme scrutiny, pricing, rolling reserve |
| Is the activity licensed in the country of the customer? | Whether the PSP takes the regulatory risk |
| What is the chargeback and refund history? | Reserve size and survival of the account |
| Who are the ultimate beneficial owners? | Sanctions and adverse media exposure |
An offshore entity fails the first question outright, which is why regional operators end up with a local subsidiary purely for collection, an arrangement that has to be documented properly or it becomes its own compliance problem. Card acquiring adds a second filter: leveraged trading sits in the categories schemes treat as high risk, with chargeback monitoring thresholds that force remediation or termination when breached. Our piece on payment approval rates goes through where the declines come from.
What a workable structure looks like
Firms that succeed in the Andean markets usually do one of two things. They license properly in one country, serve it directly, and keep the rest of the region on a strictly inbound basis with no local advertising. Or they operate from a supervised hub, price the product honestly as a foreign service, and route settlement through a payment orchestration layer that can fail over between providers when one account is closed. The second route is legal in some configurations and not in others, and the difference is decided by local counsel and by what the marketing actually says.
The operational requirement is identical either way. Onboarding that captures the right national identifier and address evidence per country, per country risk scoring, per country document retention, and a client portal in Spanish that reflects the correct entity and the correct disclosures. That layer is software, and it is what we build. Whether the licence exists is a question for a lawyer in Santiago, Bogotá or Lima, and trading remains high risk for the client no matter which of the three answers it.
"People treat the Andean markets as one region because the language is shared. The regulators are not shared, and neither are the payment rails."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Chile's CMF, Colombia's SFC with the AMV, and Peru's SMV are separate regimes; nothing passports between them.
- Colombia certifies individuals through the AMV as well as authorising firms, so both the entity and its staff can be checked.
- Local payment rails require a locally incorporated merchant, which is the first hard stop for an offshore structure.
- Card acquiring adds scheme level high risk treatment with chargeback thresholds that end accounts when breached.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can one licence cover Chile, Colombia and Peru?
No. There is no passporting equivalent between them. Each country runs its own register and its own authorisation process, and being authorised in one gives no standing in the others. Regional integration exists at the market infrastructure level, not at the level of intermediary licensing.
Why can't an offshore entity use local Andean payment rails?
Local rails are contracted through locally regulated payment providers, and those providers onboard merchants that are locally incorporated with a domestic tax identifier. A foreign entity fails that check at the first step. Firms therefore either incorporate locally for collection, which brings its own obligations, or accept card and international rails with lower approval rates.
What happens if a firm markets to these countries without authorisation?
Supervisors in all three publish warning lists naming entities they consider unauthorised. Beyond the direct enforcement risk, appearing on such a list is read by banks, payment providers and liquidity providers as adverse media, which usually costs the firm its accounts faster than any regulatory action does.
About the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.