디지털 경제와 핀테크 - 소비자 보호를 중심으로 -

FinTech is the term used to describe the impact of new technologies on the financial services industry. As the 4th Industrial Revolution is making progress, crowd funding, P2P lending, internet banking, online bank, block chain and distributed ledger technology, big data analytics and artificial intelligence have given rise to new services and business models by established financial institutions and new startups. This article aims to survey the inception and present condition of FinTech and to explore the implication of regulating FinTech firms in the viewpoint of innovation and consumer protection. The portion of the FinTech firms (including FinTechs and TechFins) is more and more increasing in the financial services market. And the FinTech changes rapidly and continuously. Fintech is at the confluence of various digital technologies and financial areas, regarded as positive in the eye of consumer protection in the wide sense with helping many startups and scaleups proposing innovative financial services and producing consumer surplus in the relevant market and improving consumer welfare in the national economy dimension. However established financial services businesses are facing some of the challenges that fintech firms initiate and they will feel receiving unfair treatment if FinTech firms are exempted from existing regulation. The Framework Act On Administrative Regulations defines that Regulations as restrictions on the rights of citizens (including foreigners subject to Acts of the Republic of Korea) or duties imposed thereon by the State or local governments to accomplish a specific administrative objective, which are prescribed by Acts and subordinate statutes, Municipal Ordinances or Municipal Rules. For the improvement of FinTech, it is not necessary to exempt FinTech firms from the regulations all the existing financial services should comply with. Rather, we should consider the necessity of a deregulation in particular from all financial services firms. Success of FinTech firms should be resulted not from preferential treatment but from their innovation. Due to the difficulties accompanied with understanding FinTech, consumers could be harmed from financial fraud or incomplete selling of financial products. Namely FinTech could give rise to the consumer protection problem in the narrow sense. Generally, although regulators around the world have been careful to avoid early regulation of cryptocurrency-related activity so as not to stifle innovation, and so as to better understand a technology that is still in its infancy, yet fast developing, high levels of fraudulent activity and potential harm to consumers are now clear drivers towards selective regulation and greater guidance in this field. Since the FCA launched its regulatory sandbox, there has been a proliferation of sandboxes announced by other jurisdictions including Australia, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Hong Kong. The Republic of Korea launched regulatory sandbox for FinTech since April 2019 when the Special Act on Support for Financial Innovation was enforced. Because testing in the sandbox is not fully regulated, risks for consumers and the financial system could materialize in the regulatory sandbox. And clients, for that reason, may refrain from entering into business with FinTech firms in the sandbox and this may slow the FinTech’s growth. Therefore the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S., the German BaFin as well as both French regulators APRI and AMF have declined to create regulatory sandboxes. Without ensuring consumer protection, we could not anticipate the financial innovation and prosperity in the market. So the purpose of consumer protection is limit to the deregulation policy. The fundamental solution for overcoming various obstacles would be the substituting principle-based regulations for positive regulations and the abolition of unnecessary regulation. The so-called RegTech has the potential to free up large sums of operational and capital expenditure which are currently spent on compliance and to enable us to develope smart regulation.