This resolution modifies the regulations on credit and debit cards, on information transparency and contracts with financial-system users, and also Appendix 2 of Circular 184/2015: the Customer Care Circular, already reported in Progreso 5.

The Banking, Insurance & Pension-Fund Supervisor (Superintendencia de Banca, Seguros y AFP) approved the modifications to the Regulation for Credit and Debit Cards, as well as the change to the regulation on Information Transparency and contracts with financial system users, in order to further protect credit-card users and simplify procedures to make them easier to understand and better suited to their needs.

This resolution recognises the following user rights:

1. To decide how to apply payments to the credit-card account
2. To make partial prepayments
3. To ensure that the credit card payment is always applied to their debt.

The regulation sets out the order in which payments are to be applied. The first payment should be on the debt bearing the highest interest rate and continue down to the debt with the lowest interest rate. Nonetheless, users have the right to choose another way of applying the payment, if they so wish.

The resolution also makes provisions enabling users from now onwards to make partial upfront payments. In these cases the banking entity will have to employ the corresponding mechanisms for applying the payment to reducing the interest, fees and expenses due.

Finally, the regulation makes the proviso that any disbursement of sums equivalent to more than two upcoming payment instalments can be treated as a prepayment, meaning that the users, if they wish, may reduce either the sum of the remaining instalments in the same timeframe, or else the number of payments, with the corresponding reduction in the credit period.

The resolution passed into law on 10th February 2016 and gives banking institutions until 31st December 2016 to adapt to its provisions.