The Fintech Playbook for Latin America

Don't let your ambition fall prey of commercial wisdom. If you're a consensus play, there's just no alpha. We serve over 3,000,000 consumers, over 50,000 merchant partners. We have incredible cost to serve economics, over 200 agents in production. We built a company on a monorepo as opposed to microservices. Monorepos today are all the rage. Anthropics built on a monorepo. Google, obviously, famously is a monorepo company. When we started the company, microservices was where it was at. So why did you make the decision? What gave you the forethought to make it? I hired the best CTO in the business. How did you get your organization culturally moving as quickly as you have? It's basically a combination of two things. We have a very clear view of where we are and where we wanna be. We have been extremely explicit with folks about standards and expectations. It's not going to be easy. It hasn't been easy, but Building a technology company in Latin America often means solving problems that don't exist elsewhere. Fragmented financial infrastructure, limited access to credit, and underdeveloped software systems create challenges, but also opportunities to rethink how commerce and financial services work. Over the last several years, Adi has grown from a buy now, pay later product into a broader platform spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and banking. Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez speak with Adi founder and CEO Santiago Suarez about financial inclusion, technology We're here today with Santiago Suarez, the founder and CEO of Adi. Adi is a buy now, pay later marketplace and payments platform in Colombia, and now just recently a bank. And Adi has served over 25% of the population. Welcome to the show. Thrilled to be here. Amazing. Thank you. Alright. So for those in our audience who may be less familiar with Adi, can you give us a sense of what does the company do now and what scale are you at? Absolutely. So we provide consumers and merchants with financial solutions such as credit at the point of sale, instantaneous payments, logistics. We just got our banking license. So you should think of it as the kind of elemental fabric of commerce and financial services in one of the fastest growing Latin American economies. Size wise, we serve over 3,000,000 consumers or 50,000 merchant partners. That's a little bit about the scale of Adi and what we do today. Okay. So we're gonna talk a lot about Adi. I think it's interesting to talk about your career pre Adi. So you're from Columbia. You came to The US to go to college. You joined the startup as a first employee, and you're pretty public about being fired from said startup. And then left, very surgically created a list of the 10 best operators in your mind, and you wanted to go work for one of those. Yep. And you chose Jamie Dimott. So maybe walk us through the lessons from those experiences that relate to what you're …