"Marval O'Farrell Mairal has a highly specialised and hard-working team. Both partners and associates demonstrate a comprehensive level of understanding of complex FinTech issues. Their service is top-tier."
Chambers Latin America, 2025
"The team's technical and practical expertise stands out. They understand the underlying business aspects that are involved with a matter in order to provide advice that actually reflects commercial realities. Fintech involves very unique business cases, so this quality stands out as paramount to delivering excellent service."
Legal 500
Marval is the leading law firm advising on all aspects of the FinTech sector in Argentina. Our firm and the partner in charge of the FinTech area, Juan M. Diehl Moreno, were again ranked for fourth time in Band 1 at the prestigious publication ‘Chambers FinTech Guide 2024’, as well as being ranked Tier 1 by Legal500 in Fintech (2024).
Marval’s FinTech department has always been recognized in this category since its creation in 2020. According to Chambers, “Marval O'Farrell Mairal has a highly specialised and hard-working team. Both partners and associates demonstrate a comprehensive level of understanding of complex FinTech issues. Their service is top-tier”, “The team are excellent. They always give complete analysis including regulatory, practical and market advice in a simple and clear way”, and “The team have outstanding analytical skills and understanding of the main risks and attributes of the FinTech business.”
As entities that regulate financial activity and the capital market in Argentina increasingly focus on the burgeoning Fintech industry, Marval’s Fintech team provides clients with practical, comprehensive and real-time advice to reduce risk in the face of changes and developments in the regulation.
Our team is made up of professionals with extensive training and interdisciplinary experience, with a focus on providing comprehensive, strategic and personalized advice on all the regulations of the different areas applicable to Fintech companies.
The Fintech practice targets areas such as capital markets, anti-money laundering, taxes, labor, corporate, intellectual property, confidentiality rules, consumer defense, rules that regulate digital signatures and electronic signatures, as well as the regulatory framework applicable to entities subject to the regulations of the Argentine Central Bank, the National Securities Commission and the Financial Information Unit.
We also have a strong presence in the revolutionary virtual asset industry, both locally and internationally, providing advice on those aspects that are not yet regulated such as crypto token issuances and decentralized finance, and on recently regulated aspects, such as the operation of Virtual Asset Service Providers.
We have strong relationships with regulators, brokers, banks, funds, insurers, and infrastructure providers in the Fintech ecosystem.
Our team has extensive experience advising a wide variety of clients, including major players in the financial services, telecommunications and technology industries. Our clientele includes payment service providers, virtual asset service providers, platform operators, providers of new financial models, and other players in the Fintech sector that take advantage of disruptive technology and the advantages that new business models offer.
We also advise major players in the financial sector such as banks, private equity and venture capital funds, asset managers, broker-dealers, insurance companies, trading platforms and exchanges and distributed ledger technology platforms, as well as other players in the capital market.
In recent times, Argentina has positioned itself as a cutting-edge market in the Fintech industry, with growth driven by innovations in the digital payments and virtual asset sectors.
Regarding the most relevant developments in the Fintech sector during this first half of 2024, we highlight that on March 14, 2024, Law No. 27,739 was enacted, which regulated different aspects of 'Virtual Asset Service Providers' (VASPs).
We invite you to learn about all the news of Fintech regulation in our Fintech Dossier.
Among other matters related to the Fintech sector, Marval has provided legal, regulatory and tax advice to regulated activities and entities.
We provide advice with respect to, among other matters:
- strategies for the establishment and development of digital banks;
- digital lending platforms for Argentine banks;
- adjustments of KYC procedures for the digital banks;
- use of electronic signatures for financial services contracting;
- foreign banks, in connection with the use of mobile apps and websites to attract local customers;
- debit, credit, purchase and prepaid cards;
In addition, we have provided comprehensive advice to payment service providers and to all participants of the credit card payment system (aggregators, acquirers and issuers).
In particular, we have extensive experience in the following areas:
- regulatory analysis and regulatory framework according to the type of business related to digital payments (e.g., payment acquiring or aggregation);
- registration before the Argentine Central Bank;
- AML/FT/FP advice and registration before the Financial Information Unit of issuers of Virtual Asset Service Providers, nonfinancial issuers of credit, purchase, or prepaid cards, acquirers, aggregators, and payment facilitators.
- negotiation of contracts with the most relevant acquirers in the market;
- technicallegal advice on Argentine Central Bank’s 3.0 transfer regulation;
- processes and reports on compliance status of any regulation applicable to a Fintech in the payments vertical.
Among other matters related to the Crypto sector, Marval has provided legal, regulatory and tax advice regarding:
- recently regulated aspects, such as the operation of Virtual Asset Service Providers regulated by the Argentine Securities Commission. Aspects such as the ‘VASP Registry' among others
- cryptoasset exchange platforms, both local and international. In this regard, we have advised them, among other issues, on the risk of financial intermediation before the Argentine Central Bank;
- corporate legal structure for the operation of cryptoasset exchange platforms in Argentina;
- KYC procedures for cryptoasset exchange platforms;
- issuance of tokens and risk mitigation for their characterization as 'negotiable security' by the Argentine Securities Commission;
- asset tokenization projects;
- remittance companies that use cryptoassets to transfer funds;
- drafting of cryptoasset custody contracts.