chapter 01 ORIGIN AND DEPLOYMENT OF FINTECH IN LATIN AMERICA Even though the term FinTech is new, technology has always had a role to play in the financial sector. The first Latin-American apps date from deployment of auto- matic teller machines in 1972, the emergence of the first banking credit cards were between 1950-1975, and implementation of the first online banking system in the region, documented in 1965, among others (chapter 5). At that time, all these tools represented huge innovation, facilitated the banking tasks, as well as interaction with customer, defining the path to be followed by the financial industry. However, that took place more than 50 years ago. Nowadays, these tools that, at that time, revolutionized financial services are becoming obsolete. When these innovations were conceived, the Internet and the idea of a banking service not linked to a physical branch were highly unimaginable. Now, the unimaginable is a disconnected world. Recent technological history identifies the first instance of the current worldwide FinTech wave was in the ’90s with the generalized adoption of the Internet, the emer- gence of Digital Banking and the first e-commerce websites. If we want to give a proper name to identify the genesis of this phenomenon, it is PayPal, the startup where Peter Thiel and Elon Musk met, and reached the public in 1998 as a digital payment platform. It currently has more than 237 million active us- A TWO-WAY PATH 13