Fintech Regulatory Sandbox

The ECSRC is committed to encouraging and facilitating financial innovation where it is likely to be beneficial to investors and the market. To keep up with the increasing developments in financial technology and to achieve the mission of the Commission in facilitating market development, the ECSRC strives to provide the right parity between financial stability, innovation, and consumer protection.

To achieve higher financial inclusion, financial innovations are needed but those innovations usually mean that the sophisticated new forms of financial products or services do not fit in neatly with the current regulatory framework. The importance of innovation for financial inclusion is well established as is investor and consumer trust and confidence. In that regard, the ECSRC believes that regulatory sandboxes can facilitate the advancement of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) and the Eastern Caribbean Securities Market (ECSM).

The direct objective of the ECSRC Regulatory Sandbox is to promote and facilitate financial innovation within the ECSM and in so doing:

• Enable firms with innovative financial products or services, FinTech, that relate to securities, to test those products, services, technologies, and business models in real-world implementation.
• Help the ECSRC to learn about market developments and obtain knowledge on the new regulatory needs required to adequately regulate and supervise the innovative developments in the financial market

The ECSRC believes that the Regulatory Sandbox will prove to be a valuable tool which signals the ECSRC’s openness to innovation and provides a learning opportunity for both the ECSRC and participant firms.