Last week we made the first release of the Belvo API (or v0 as we call it) that allows anyone in Latin America to access financial information with simple integration. It’s been four months since we founded Belvo and two since we wrote the very first line of code. Yes, months. Not years.
And plugging into the banking infrastructure is not an easy technology endeavor: we’ve faced many challenges within each integration we’ve implemented; we’ve discovered how differently the same bank works in each country they operate (which, in my opinion, is a huge inefficiency that reduces communication and increases time and costs, ultimately paid by us, their customers); we’ve listened and implemented changes that our clients needed and we’ve had to open dozens of bank accounts in many different institutions to test our integrations.
Banks in Mexico
But now Belvo is connected to all major banks in Mexico, the first country we are going live in (Colombia will follow soon), and our API is built to handle all the processes from client registration to retrieving data in a secure, fast and robust way. We have successfully proven how our clients can link end-users banking credentials to access account, transaction, and ownership data, a crucial piece of information for any company building and distributing financial products.
One side of the technical challenge we face is accessing banking data with end-users consent but without bank dependencies. There are commonly used solutions that take advantage of screen-scraping to access website information, but the robustness and speed of these solutions are always disappointing. We go a lot deeper and connect to their internal APIs. By fully reverse engineering banks’ websites and apps we obtain unbeatable uptimes and response times.
The other side of the challenge is providing a powerful and fast RESTful API with excellent documentation that is easy to implement by our clients. We’ve built it using Django on steroids (more info from our tech team here) and we will be releasing a beta version of the documentation together with our SDKs in the next coming weeks.
Building this product wouldn’t have been possible without a deeply experienced tech team (now close to 10 people strong) who is committed to improve the way everyone interacts with financial information. Creating an agile and remote friendly environment where the team can focus on what really matters has shaped our culture and increased our development speed tremendously. We’re not only proud of what we have built so far, we are also having fun while doing it.
Democratize access
This is the first step towards our mission of bringing financial information closer to the end-user, its ultimate owner. Now you can get your information out of your bank and receive better financial services like lower credit interest rates, better investment or savings advice, or even easier accounting process for your company. And you’ll be able to get all these services in seconds, not weeks, thanks to our technology. We are democratizing access to financial information so people and not banks can decide who they want to share their information with so they can get all the benefits.
In the next couple of weeks, we will begin to work closely with dozens of clients who will be conducting pilots on top of our API. We are open to working with fintechs looking to access financial information from their clients in Mexico and other countries in Latin America, so shoot us a note if you want to work together. Go over to our website and leave us a note.
An also, if you’re a passionate and driven tech or product person looking for a new challenge in a huge market, we’re growing our team very fast. Check out our current job openings here, we’d love to hear from you.
