The fence is narrowed to intruders who, without being banks, decide to operate as such. The Government will establish the maximum sanction set for bank managers -As up to 5 million euros- For those other managers and signatures counselors that They dare to capture funds customer refundables Without having preceptive authorization or play confusion, for adopting denominations reserved for credit entities such as “Bank” or “Bank”. He does it through the future Servicers Law.
Its regulations will be incorporated into the bill of administrators and buyers of credits – the Service Law – sent to the Congress for parliamentary process after the recent approval by the Council of Ministers and At the express request of the Bank of Spain. The current regulation set strong corrective to this type of “beach bars”but Not a specific sanctioning regime for those responsible. The regulations also did not regulate a gradualness in fines for managers other than those of credit entities, imposing, by default, the sanctions for bank managers. At the proposal of the Bank of Spain it will change now.
The Law of Planning, Supervision and Solvency of Credit Entities of 2014, trunk in financial activity, prohibits expressly to people, physical and legal, carry out “reserved” activities to credit entities (banks, savings banks and credit cooperatives) without authorization. The limitation is to capture reimbursable funds from the public, that is, attract money from the saver with the commitment of their return, something that they could try to do so by way of deposits, loan, temporary assignment of financial assets or other analogs.
On the contrary, The activity of lending money to customers is currently free in Spain And it is not necessary to have an authorization to operate, although its mandatory establishment is an old claim of the industry and the sector trusts that there is also a reservation of activity when the European Consumer Directive is incorporated into the national legal system.
The aforementioned Banking Law prohibits so much the realization without authorization of activities legally reserved for the entities Credit chow “the use of their own denominations or any others that may induce confusion with them “, forcing the Mercantile Registry and the rest of the public records to denounce the registration of brands that incur said impediment and to change or add clarifying mentions to foreign credit entities that want to operate in the country if their name implies a” danger of confusion. “
If the infraction is given, said bank management regulations establish that the company is exposed to sanctions of up to 10% of the annual net business volume or up to 10 million if they carry out reserved activities or 10% of their own resources or 1 million euros if their denomination causes confusion; and the supervisor agency may also impose that end the behavior.
With the request made by the Bank of Spain and included in the Law of Service, Its managers and counselors will now be exposed to fines of up to 5 million and the risk of being disabled to exercise administration or management positions in any entity of the financial sector for a maximum of 10 years.
The need to detect and abort these practices with millionaire sanctions originates to avoid financial consumer fraud if they capture their savings and, by extension, that do not harm the regulated sector. And they are activities likely to affect the public’s confidence in the financial system, whose functioning is altered by the operation of these intruders. Only in the last five years the Bank of Spain has started up to 128 supervisory actions to companies And some people suspect that they could be carrying out reserved activities or unduly using an unauthorized denomination, of which 42 began in the field of payment services.
They are data collected from the annual supervision reports of the agency between 2019 and 2023, the last memory of the latter published in this regard. Almost every year, these inspections end up translated into fines or some type of correction, although the body does not break down amounts in the reports or always transparent names. Others do end with the dissemination of sanctions through the Official State Gazette (BOE), as happened with Services and Procedures Plaza Nueva 8 (former Pribane Álvarez and Associates) last year.
At the end of 2023, The Bank of Spain assigned the supervision competences of the activity reserve and denomination to a New Financial Fraud Prevention Unit dependent on the General Secretariat, segregating it of the General Directorate of Supervision and the General Directorate of Operations, Markets and Payment Systems that was previously responsible for its detection.
Although the incidence is limited, the agency has climbed its warning message to consumers through their own channels in recent years before the technological revolution that allows both hire with non -national signatures and for the proliferation of technological firms that enter into financial businesses.
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