For this special episode of the Open Views podcast, we sat down with Pablo Viguera and Uri Tintoré, co-founders and co-CEOs of Belvo. As they reflect on their main learnings since founding Belvo in 2019, Pablo and Uri talk about the open finance landscape in Latin America and their expectations for 2023: from the growth of payments and enrichment to the increasing adoption from big players across the region.
Listen to their thoughts in this podcast!
A year ago we reflected on how 2021 had been a period of exponential growth for our company: we had more clients, teammates, and usage than ever before. One year later, we look back at 2022 and are proud to see all the things we’ve accomplished and the consolidation we’ve experienced during these last months. Now, it’s time to see what’s coming in 2023.
In 2022 Belvo turned three years old, we celebrated our first Open Views conference gathering over 2.000 people and experts from across the globe, we received an investment from Citi Ventures, and onboarded dozens of new customers including relevant tech and fintech players as well as large financial institutions across Latin America.
Large financial institutions and big technological players represent an increasing portion of our customer base of +200 financial innovators, which proves the growing interest in open finance coming from large established entities, both incumbents and modern players like neobanks. This is a sign that open finance is here to stay and we believe that 2023 will be a key year for the consolidation and mass adoption of these models.
The growing size and scale of the companies that work with us is a promising sign in terms of future growth and use of our platform. And has already had a visible impact on our platform usage and the number of end-users that we can impact through our technology: we’ve already connected nearly 3 million financial accounts to Belvo-powered apps.
Brazil
In Brazil, this has been an exciting year when regulated Open Finance has become a reality. Given the speed at which regulation is moving in the country, we worked hard to release a solution to help regulated institutions to start accessing high-quality Open Finance data without spending time and resources on development and maintenance. And we also continue adding new sources of financial data such as receivables from point-of-sale (POS) machines. By accessing historical transactional receivables data, lenders will have a new data source to feed into their underwriting models and ERPs firms will also gain granularity about every operation between retailers and acquirers. This represents a huge opportunity: the amount of transaction value processed by mobile POS expects to reach USD +55bn in 2027 in Brazil.
Read here a full recap of open finance in Brazil in 2022 and what to expect this year.
Mexico
In Mexico, we’re witnessing how the open finance ecosystem in the country is getting stronger and increasingly attracting interest from bigger players and financial institutions as use cases emerge in the market. Hyper-personalization of services, embedding products in third-party channels, and speeding up underwriting processes are some examples of use cases that the most innovative financial institutions are already implementing in Latin America within their open finance roadmaps. As digital banking matures, both traditional players and digital ones like neobanks are already implementing these models and developing an API-first mentality to expand their reach to new audiences and deliver new, more tailored digital experiences. As a result of this, this year we joined forces with banks such as BBVA and Monte Piedad to organize events and discuss the opportunities of open finance use cases and onboarded customers like Mercado Libre, currently the biggest tech company in Latin America.
Read here a full recap of what to expect from open finance in Mexico in 2023.
Colombia
In Colombia, we recently released a new product to access fiscal data from DIAN, the central tax entity in the country. This is already being used by companies such as Melo to better understand people’s and businesses’ financial health and provide them with tailored financial services, including credit. This year we’ve also seen with excitement the publication of a new decree that states the will to create a regulated framework for Open Finance. And we’ve been an active member in the growing open finance community in the country, organized webinars to show how the ecosystem is advancing in the region, and much more.
Read here a full recap of open finance in Colombia in 2022 and what to expect this year.
2023, the year of open finance payments
This year we’ve doubled down on our existing products: we released new features to improve the experience when building with Belvo, added new sources of data aggregation and improved the strength of our machine-learning capabilities to provide better insights to our clients on top of the analysis of millions of transactions.
Another of the biggest milestones this year has been to obtain regulatory licenses to operate as a payment initiator in both Brazil and Mexico. Belvo is creating a category-defining product for the Latin American financial sector. When we launched our aggregation and enrichment products they were new to the market and had a transformational effect as they gained traction – allowing companies to create and launch financial products that it was not even possible to build before we existed.
Now, we believe that we’re on the verge of a new turning point.
We’ve already built the rails to access and interpret data from multiple sources in Latin America to help companies understand their end-users financial behavior. Now, we’re also helping companies to accept instant account-to-account payments through rails like PSE in Colombia and Open Finance payment initiation in Brazil.
This year will be key to consolidate this line of products to allow financial innovators in Latin America to move money in a more efficient, frictionless and cost-effective way, replacing other traditional systems like credit cards, and bringing exciting new use cases to the market.
Stay tuned for all the things coming for Belvo and the open finance ecosystem this year! And remember to subscribe to our Open Views podcast here.
