It’s hard to believe but today Belvo turns 3 years old! And we’re amazed to see how the company and team have grown and evolved since we got started. Let’s look back at some of the things that we’ve learned during this time.
Table of Contents
- The first answer is almost never the final answer
- Raise the bar, the commitment, and the delivery
- It’s possible to build a strong culture across countries, remotely and during the most uncertain times
They say time goes faster when you’re in a startup. And it definitely feels that way at Belvo.
We started the company in May 2019 with a small team of talented people and the ambitious goal of democratizing access to financial services in Latin America through open finance infrastructure. Back then, we couldn’t imagine that things would move so quickly!
Fast forward to today, and we have a team of approximately 150 Belvoers working from offices in Mexico City, São Paulo, Bogotá, and Barcelona –as well as remotely–, coming from over 20 different nationalities across the globe. A truly diverse, fun, and skilled team that has created the standard in open finance in Latin America.
We’re continuously humbled by seeing the amazing human quality of the team that’s decided to join us on this journey and proud to see the relentless commitment they’ve shown to help build the most comprehensive open finance API platform in the region.
As a result, our product has also grown massively during this time. We now have connections with +60 institutions through our API, reaching +90% coverage in all the countries where operate. And we now have released eight products on the market! We added investments as a new source of data to our aggregation solution and we’ve launched four enrichment products during the last 12 months: Categorization, Income verification, Risk insights, and Recurring expenses.
In the last 12 months, we also went through huge milestones for our growth including our $43 million Series A funding round and achieving our ISO 27001:2013 certification, doubling down on our commitment to building the most secure and robust platform in the market.
During this time, we’ve also learned many valuable lessons that have helped us grow and we’d like to share some of them with you today.
The first answer is almost never the final answer
When we first started Belvo many told us that what we had set out to do would be impossible to achieve. They thought that people and companies wouldn’t be willing to share their financial data and that we were “crazy” for trying to build a company out of permissioned financial data sharing.
Three years later, we couldn’t be happier that we persevered in spite of this. Today over 1 million people and companies have connected accounts through Belvo-powered apps and over 70% of users show intent and are willing to share their data through our platform.
Over 150 companies are already working with us and launching new products and services that couldn’t exist before, proving that our platform was not only possible to build – but a clear need in the Latin American financial market.
This has been (and still is) a process of constant learning, which has also taught us that we always need to dig deeper while building products, stay curious, challenge every scenario, and analyze all the edge cases. Make decisions based on data and talk to as many people as we can to validate our hypothesis.
Raise the bar, the commitment, and the delivery
Along this journey, we’ve also learned that the only way to move forward is by constantly pushing our boundaries and raising the bar to get the best results. Never settling and always looking for new solutions to the challenges we find on the way.
This mindset has helped us scale our platform, serve increasingly bigger customers and become our best version every day. We now work with some of the region’s fastest-growing and leading financial companies including both B2B and B2C players like Rappi, Mercado Libre, Intuit, Ferratum, Neon, BS2, Mobills, and Jeeves. And we wouldn’t have achieved it without taking risks and always aiming as high as possible in every single one of our decisions.
We know the road ahead of us is still long, and that we have fulfilled less than 1% of our vision so far, but we couldn’t be more excited to see what’s coming next.
It’s possible to build a strong culture across countries, remotely and during the most uncertain times
Maybe one of the first challenges that we faced as we built Belvo was building a strong company culture in a team that’s spread across countries and offices, where we speak different languages and share different backgrounds.
But our question marks were quickly dismissed as the company grew and a genuine and strong culture started to emerge and transcend any physical boundaries. Belvo’s team’s fun spirit has made it easy to build our own language and ways to communicate in a distributed environment without feeling disconnected.
We’ve also been able to pair our digital lives with more and more physical gatherings thanks to initiatives such as ‘Working from any offices’, which we launched last year and has already taken over 15 Belvoers to travel and visit their peers in offices in other countries.
This year we also celebrated our first (of many) company-wide offsite event, where we gathered the whole team together for the first time and had the chance to see how our strong culture and values translate into real-life experiences that made us feel even more connected.
This year we’ll continue to hire across countries and roles to double the size of the team, visit our careers page if you’d like to join us on this journey.
For many years to come at Belvo!
#TamoJunto #VamosConTodo
