Mexico’s Digital Economy Law for Digital and Electronic Payments took effect on November 5, a day after publication in the official gazette, giving the CURP Digital legal standing as a way to sign up for financial services online and requiring lenders to accept the country’s new Citizen Digital File when customers ask them to.
The law cleared Congress last month. Its Article 5 recognizes the CURP Digital, a digital form of the unique population registry code, as a “trust mechanism” for contracting financial services digitally, under rules that the authorities will issue. Article 6 lets people choose between the CURP Digital and any other official identification, so institutions cannot treat it as the only option.
The Citizen Digital File, or Expediente Digital Ciudadano, is meant to let a person consult and use documents and data that government agencies already hold about them. Institutions must accept it when a customer requests it, allowing the documents in it to be consulted and carried over, and those digital documents have the same legal effect as physical ones. The obligation covers banks, multiple-purpose and popular financial companies, community finance companies, savings and loan cooperatives, credit unions, fintech institutions and trustees of lending trusts, along with any company that regularly lends to the public. The law firm Basham says that last category could reach retailers that routinely finance sales in installments.
For the CURP Digital to serve as official identification, its holder must have a biometric CURP, which adds fingerprints and a photograph to the 18-character code. The General Population Law makes a CURP with those data the national identification document, in physical and digital formats, and under the National Law to Eliminate Bureaucratic Procedures authorities and private parties must accept it without asking for another ID. People can register their biometric data at no charge at modules run by civil registry and population authorities. The digital version falls to the Agency for Digital Transformation and Telecommunications.
The law’s main aim is to reduce the use of cash. The Finance Ministry has 15 business days to name the sectors in which digital payment may become the only accepted method, with gas stations and toll booths expected to come first, and sector regulators then have another 15 business days to issue rules for the transition. Basham says much of the law’s practical reach depends on those secondary rules, along with others from the central bank and banking regulator, and that it contains no penalty regime of its own.
Sources: Diario Oficial de la Federación, General Population Law Art. 91 Bis, Basham, Expansión Política, Expansión
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
