DMA Business Group on Latin America’s Fintech Stage

On November 10, the Hilton Hotel in San Salvador brought together the region’s financial and technology ecosystem for the third edition of El Salvador Fintech Forum, organized by ASAFINTECH and presented by Visa. DMA Business Group was there as an Excellence-category sponsor, on the main stage and with its own team on the floor throughout the day.

This was not a logo on a banner. It was the full firm on the ground: auditors, U.S. tax strategy specialists and the compliance team, meeting founders, operators and advisors who arrived with concrete questions about how to put order into an operation that lives across two countries.

The panel: what is still to be built

Mario Meléndez, director of DMA Executive Education and partner at DMA Business Group, joined the panel “Fintech regulation: what is still to be built?”, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. on the main stage. He was joined by Daniel Leiva, of Torres Legal; José Rodríguez, of Nodeman; and Mario Lozano, partner and head of the fintech practice at ARIAS. Dionisio Machuca, legal manager and secretary of Banco Agrícola, moderated.

The discussion turned on how much ground is left to cover for financial innovation to operate under predictable rules, and on what that means in practice for companies already building on that framework. It is a debate DMA follows closely from the accounting and compliance side, which is where regulatory definitions end up landing as concrete obligations.

Audit and U.S. tax strategy at the same table

What DMA brought to the forum was summed up on the banner behind its stand: accounting, tax, audit and compliance for fintechs, in El Salvador and the United States. Two regions, one strategist.

That combination is uncommon in the region, and it is why the whole team travelled. A fintech that invoices from El Salvador and collects in the United States does not have an accounting problem and a separate tax problem: it has a single operation that two authorities read under different criteria. The firm’s auditors and its U.S. tax strategy specialists work the same file, and that is precisely what was discussed at the stand all day.

The firm’s experience in digital assets did not come from the moment. It follows from more than five years serving U.S. companies in accounting, tax and compliance: when those clients began operating with digital assets, DMA had to understand the ground before the local market started discussing it. That track record placed it among the first Salvadoran firms to offer audit, compliance and consulting services geared to digital asset companies.

An ecosystem built through conversation

This year the forum brought together fintech associations from fourteen Ibero-American countries, alongside regulators, investors and operators from across the payments chain, with an agenda spanning asset tokenization, stablecoins, digital payments, Open Finance, digital identity and financial inclusion.

For a firm working between El Salvador and the United States, that is exactly the room where the direction of the market becomes clear — and where you meet, in person, the companies that in six months will need to put their numbers in order across two jurisdictions at once.

DMA Business Group thanks ASAFINTECH for organizing the forum and everyone who stopped by the stand. To talk about accounting, tax, audit or compliance between El Salvador and the United States, the team is available at [email protected].