A recently published bill in Colombia seeks to strengthen consumer protection in electronic commerce — with a sharp focus on fintech lending. After a wave of consumer complaints against digital lenders, legislators are attempting to draw a clear legal line between what counts as legitimate interest and what qualifies as an abusive charge.
What the Bill Proposes
The legislation specifically questions charges related to technology use in the lending process: electronic signatures, risk center consultations, and similar digital-native costs. These, the bill argues, should not be passed on to borrowers as separate line items on top of stated interest rates.
The Superintendency of Industry and Commerce (SIC) backed parts of the initiative, noting a pattern of practices that would be impermissible under traditional banking rules yet had gone unchallenged in the fintech space — a gap that has widened as digital lenders have scaled.
The Tension at the Heart of Regulation
The bill reflects a broader tension in Latin American fintech policy: the same regulatory ambiguity that allowed fintech to expand financial access to underserved populations also created room for some players to exploit grey areas at consumers' expense.
Bringing legal certainty is the right goal. But the execution matters — overly prescriptive rules risk treating digital and traditional lending as identical when, operationally, they are not. The challenge is writing rules that protect consumers without inadvertently penalizing the innovation that made digital lending viable in the first place.
I published my full analysis of the bill's implications — for both consumers and fintech operators — in Legis Ámbito Jurídico. The original article was published in Spanish.