Chile Acquiring After Transbank: Deregulation and Cross-Border Rules

Chile spent three decades with one acquirer. Understanding what replaced it matters less than understanding what changed in the last seven months, because two things did, and both are dated, both are primary-sourced, and both change what an operator does.

In January 2026 a competition regulator formally released Transbank's tariffs from regulation. In July 2025 the financial regulator created a licensed route for foreign merchants to accept Chilean-issued cards. Neither is in most country overviews, including PaymentBrief's own Chile market guide, which covers the landscape rather than the mechanics.

How Chile got here, briefly

Transbank was founded in 1989 by a group of Chilean banks and operated as the acquirer for its owner-banks — a three-party arrangement in which the issuers, the owners and the only acquirer were the same set of institutions.

Competition authorities circled it for two decades. What eventually moved was the structure: Transbank obtained its own scheme licences and began operating under a four-party model on 1 April 2020, separating brand, acquirer-operator, issuer and merchant into distinct roles. Transbank's own material states it "comenzamos a operar el pasado 01 de abril de 2020," and the TDLC's later resolution independently records that Transbank submitted for consultation the tariff system it had implemented from that date.

The historical detail matters only because it explains the condition attached to what came next.

The deregulation, and the precise condition behind it

TDLC Resolución N°86/2025, dated 11 March 2025 in procedure Rol NC 521-23, approved Transbank's tariff system subject to conditions. The one that matters set out when regulation could end. In the resolution's own words, deregulation was authorised once, among other requirements:

Rechazar la petición de Transbank de desregular el margen adquirente desde la fecha en que se solicita. No obstante, se autoriza a proceder con esa desregulación cuando se cumpla la condición que la participación mensual de Transbank en el segmento de procesamiento adquirente, medida en número de transacciones, sea inferior al 50% por un período de a lo menos seis meses seguidos, cuestión que deberá ser constatada por la Fiscalía Nacional Económica a solicitud de parte interesada, sin necesidad de un nuevo procedimiento de consulta.

Three things in that paragraph are easy to skim past and all matter. The threshold is measured en número de transacciones — by transaction count, not by value — and a different denominator would give a different answer at a different time. It must hold for at least six consecutive months, not at a point in time. And the finding was to be made by the FNE on the application of an interested party, without a new consultation procedure — which is why the eventual release came as an FNE archiving resolution rather than a fresh tribunal ruling.

On 28 January 2026, the Fiscalía Nacional Económica issued Resolución N°22, declaring that condition fulfilled — that Transbank's monthly share of acquirer processing, measured in transaction count, "ha sido inferior al 50% por un período de a lo menos seis meses seguidos" — and archiving investigation Rol N°2812-25.

So Transbank's acquirer margin is now a commercial number. Until January 2026 it was constrained by a cost-audited regulated system. It is not any more.

For an operator this cuts both ways and the honest reading is that nobody knows yet. Deregulation was earned by competition arriving, so the constraint on pricing is now competitive rather than regulatory. Whether that produces lower prices than the regulated regime did is an empirical question that will take some quarters to answer, and no post-deregulation Chilean MDR figures were found in the sources reviewed. Anyone quoting you one should be asked where it came from.

Interchange is capped separately, and is not MDR

This is the distinction most likely to produce a wrong number in a pricing model.

Interchange in Chile is set by a committee constituted for the purpose under Law 21.365. Its limits were set in two stages:

The lower figures are the ones everyone quotes, and they are not in force. TDLC Resolución 86 records what happened: "Con todo, antes de que comenzaran a regir estos últimos límites, por resolución de 30 de septiembre de 2024 el Comité determinó el inicio de un procedimiento de revisión de los límites a las TI vigentes a esa fecha y dispuso como medida provisional la mantención de aquellos." — before the month-18 limits began to apply, the Committee opened a review of the limits then in force and, as a provisional measure, maintained them.

So the operative ceilings are the month-6 figures: 0.50% debit, 1.14% credit, 0.94% prepaid, held provisionally pending a review that had not concluded as of the March 2025 resolution. Whether that review has since concluded was not established in the sources reviewed — check the committee's own publications before relying on any Chilean interchange number.

These are ceilings on the issuer's share, passed through rather than retained by the acquirer. The merchant discount rate is the total the merchant pays, of which interchange is one component and the acquirer margin — now deregulated — is another.

A published interchange cap is not a merchant price. Reading the operative 0.50% debit cap as "debit acceptance costs 0.50% in Chile" is the same error as reading an EU interchange cap as an EU MDR, and it will understate cost materially — before you even reach the question of which cap is in force.

A sourcing note, stated plainly because it affects how much weight to put on these figures. The Banco Central document that would carry these rates directly returns an 837-byte bot-block shell, and no archived snapshot exists. The figures above are cited from the TDLC resolution, which was genuinely retrieved and which recounts the committee's own Resolución Exenta of 22 February 2023. That is regulator-sourced at one remove — reliable, but verify against the committee's own publication before using them in a contract.

The cross-border regime, which is the newest operator-relevant thing

CMF Norma de Carácter General N°541, dated 23 July 2025, is the change most likely to affect a non-Chilean business, and it is recent enough that most country material predates it. One provenance note: the substantive rule originates in a Banco Central Council Agreement, which NCG 541 implements through CMF instructions — the document refers to itself throughout as esta Circular. Cite NCG 541 for the operative requirements, but do not describe the CMF as having originated the policy.

It defines cross-border acquiring in the norm's own words as:

…aquella actividad consistente en afiliar y asumir compromisos de pago originados por el uso de Tarjetas de Pago emitidas en Chile con uno o más comercios no domiciliados o no residentes en Chile.

That is: affiliating merchants not domiciled or resident in Chile so they can accept cards issued in Chile.

To carry that activity, the norm creates a sub-acquiring operator category with minimum equity requirements:

Two operational mechanics come with it. An operator that exceeds the sub-acquiring operation threshold for two consecutive quarters must meet the minimum capital requirements within six months — so the obligation is triggered by sustained volume rather than by a single month's spike. And providers already operating when the amendments took effect were given 90 banking business days from entry into force to file.

The obligation sits on the operator, not on the foreign merchant. In practice a foreign merchant reaches Chilean cardholders through an operator holding this status, rather than by incorporating in Chile. That is a genuinely different answer from the one a pre-2025 market guide would give.

Who can actually acquire

The CMF maintains a public register of card operators, with individually numbered and dated resolutions. From the register directly:

One precision point, because it is the sort of thing that gets miscited: Transbank's Resolución 5304 resolves an appeal (reposición), not a fresh registration. If you cite it, cite it for what it is.

On market share, one number is defensible and the rest are not. The regulator-sourced fact is the threshold crossing itself: FNE's confirmation that Transbank fell below 50% of acquirer processing by transaction count for six-plus consecutive months. The TDLC resolution also carries share figures, but they are deliberately banded for confidentiality — Transbank in the [55–60]% range for processed transactions as at June 2024, Getnet [15–20]%, others lower — and they predate the crossing FNE later confirmed.

Every other Chilean acquiring market-share figure encountered while researching this article came from press estimates on mutually incompatible bases: terminal counts, total payment volume, transaction counts and "processing share" used interchangeably, producing numbers that cannot be reconciled. None is used here. If a share figure matters to your decision, anchor to the FNE threshold fact or to the TDLC bands, and treat everything else as unsourced.

Account-to-account, and what Chile does not yet have

Chile has had immediate interbank transfers via TEF since 2008, cleared through the Cámara de Compensación Automatizada, and payment-initiation providers such as Khipu build merchant checkout on top of them.

What Chile does not have, in the sources reviewed, is a blanket instant-payments mandate of the kind Brazil imposed with Pix or India with UPI. The Banco Central has been moving that way — it opened a consultation on broadening access to the real-time gross settlement system in November 2025 — but no final rule publication date was established in the sources reviewed.

Treat merchant-facing instant payments in Chile as an emerging capability rather than a settled rail, and be sceptical of anything describing a "Chilean Pix" as though it exists today.

What an operator should take from this

• Transbank's fees are no longer regulated. As of 28 January 2026 the acquirer margin is commercial. Any pricing assumption inherited from the regulated era is stale.
• The threshold was measured by transaction count, over six consecutive months. If you are reasoning about competitive position in Chile, that is the metric the regulator used.
• Interchange and MDR are different things set by different mechanisms, and the interchange number most people quote is not the one in force. The operative debit ceiling is 0.50%, not the 0.35% that was scheduled and then frozen — and either way it is a cap on the issuer's share, not the cost of accepting debit.
• A foreign merchant now has a defined route to Chilean cards through a licensed sub-acquiring operator, and the capital obligation sits with the operator.
• Use the CMF register, not press summaries, for who acquires in Chile — and note that one frequently-cited Transbank resolution is an appeal ruling.
• Publish no Chilean acquiring market-share number you cannot trace to FNE's threshold finding or the TDLC's banded figures.