The Fintech Playbook for Latin America
a16z PodcastFull Title
The Fintech Playbook for Latin America
Summary
This episode features a conversation with Santiago Suarez, founder and CEO of Addy, a rapidly growing fintech company in Latin America. Suarez discusses the challenges and opportunities of building a comprehensive financial and commerce platform in the region, emphasizing technology, AI, and strategic focus.
Key Points
- Addy has evolved from a "buy now, pay later" service into a broad platform encompassing payments, commerce, logistics, and banking, serving over 3 million consumers and 50,000 merchants.
- Suarez's early career experiences, including being fired from a startup and learning from top operators, shaped his understanding of ambition, organization, and the potential of technology.
- Colombia was chosen as Addy's starting point due to high smartphone adoption and a strong existing "pay over time" culture, despite perceived market difficulties, which presented a unique opportunity to innovate.
- The company's success is attributed to a contrarian approach, focusing deeply on one market (Colombia) rather than spreading thinly across many, inspired by companies like Caspi.
- Addy prioritizes building its own technology stack and infrastructure, including a monorepo architecture and event sourcing, to enable scalability and control, particularly for AI integrations.
- The company's AI strategy focuses on building in-house agents for customer service and merchant onboarding, demonstrating significant efficiency gains and a commitment to AI-native operations.
- Attracting and retaining top talent is a key focus, achieved by running the company in English to broaden the talent pool and maintaining high standards and clear expectations.
- Addy's future vision involves significant expansion in financial inclusion and economic development, leveraging its combined retail and financial services technology, and becoming a truly AI-driven organization.
- The company emphasizes a "North Star metric" for focus, particularly on profitability, and a strong culture of documenting everything to ensure clarity and scalability.
Conclusion
Building a successful fintech in Latin America requires a deep understanding of local market dynamics and a willingness to adopt unconventional strategies.
Technology, particularly AI, is a core differentiator, enabling companies to create efficient operations and innovative solutions for financial inclusion.
Entrepreneurs should prioritize building strong foundational technology, attracting top talent, and maintaining ambitious yet contrarian visions for long-term success.
Discussion Topics
- What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for fintech innovation in emerging markets compared to developed ones?
- How can companies effectively leverage AI to drive both operational efficiency and customer value in the financial services sector?
- What are the most critical lessons for founders building ambitious, technology-driven companies in complex, rapidly evolving markets?
Key Terms
- Monorepo
- A software development strategy where code for many projects is stored in the same version control repository.
- Microservices
- An architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small, independent services.
- Event sourcing
- An architectural pattern where all changes to application state are stored as a sequence of immutable events.
- Kafka
- An open-source distributed event streaming platform used for building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications.
- Databricks
- A unified data analytics platform that provides tools for data engineering, machine learning, and data science.
- LLMs (Large Language Models)
- A type of artificial intelligence model trained on vast amounts of text data, capable of understanding and generating human-like text.
- Transformers
- A deep learning model architecture particularly effective for natural language processing tasks, forming the basis of many LLMs.
- KYC (Know Your Customer)
- A set of processes and regulations used by financial institutions to verify the identity of their clients.
- RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
- A machine learning technique used to align AI models with human preferences and values.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score)
- A metric used to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction.
- EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization)
- A measure of a company's overall financial performance.
- OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)
- A goal-setting framework used by organizations to define and track objectives and their outcomes.
- DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)
- Principles and practices aimed at ensuring fair representation and opportunities for all individuals within an organization.
Timeline
Suarez reflects on his early life in Colombia and coming to the US for college on a full scholarship, highlighting how this experience redefined his definition of possibility.
Suarez discusses his experience at his first startup, Navia, and the lessons learned from its co-founder dynamics and being fired.
Suarez explains his intentional strategy to learn from successful CEOs by creating a list of top operators and seeking opportunities to work near them, leading to his time at JP Morgan.
Suarez details why he chose to start Addy in Colombia, contrary to the conventional wisdom of targeting larger markets like Brazil or Mexico.
Suarez outlines the two key factors he identified in Colombia that presented a significant opportunity: widespread smartphone adoption and a cultural affinity for installment payments.
Suarez highlights the poor customer experience (UX) with existing financial services in Colombia, citing lengthy installment application processes and counterintuitive banking fees as examples of pain points Addy aimed to solve.
Suarez shares the story of meeting the CEO of Caspi, a successful single-market fintech in Kazakhstan, and the lessons learned about deep focus and contrarian strategies.
Suarez describes how he approached the CEO of Caspi and the valuable insights gained from their conversation regarding focus, roadmap strategy, and investor relations.
Suarez discusses Caspi's approach to customer experience and how their focus on NPS and listening to customer service calls influenced their product development.
Suarez touches upon Caspi's counterintuitive approach to product roadmap development and how they managed to launch multiple significant features simultaneously.
Suarez recounts Caspi's advice regarding unconventional strategies and how equity investors might not initially understand them but can eventually lead to significant success.
Suarez reflects on Addy's recognition by Fast Company as a top innovative fintech company, attributing it to long-term investments in technology paying off.
Suarez elaborates on Addy's technological foundation, including a monorepo architecture and the ability to scale Large Language Models (LLMs).
Suarez highlights Addy's extensive payment network, internal processing capabilities, and advanced AI applications like in-house agents for customer service and merchant onboarding.
Suarez explains Addy's approach to AI adoption, emphasizing the need to build foundational technology in-house due to the lack of available services in Latin America.
Suarez details the two foundational decisions made seven years prior that enable Addy's AI capabilities: adopting a monorepo and building an event sourcing architecture.
Suarez discusses the decision to use a monorepo instead of microservices, highlighting the foresight and the benefits for agent-based systems.
Suarez explains the company's event sourcing architecture and the massive volume of daily events generated, processed through Kafka and Databricks.
Suarez describes the counterintuitive decision to start with legal compliance for AI development, driven by the necessity of rapid response and data integration in the Colombian legal system.
Suarez details how the rigorous legal pipelines enabled the rapid development and success of Addy's customer service AI agents.
Suarez discusses the strategy of attracting global talent by operating the company in English, which counterintuitively also attracts high-caliber local talent.
Suarez emphasizes the importance of running the company in English for talent attraction and the benefits of formal documentation for an AI-first environment.
Suarez explains how Addy culturally shifted towards an AI-forward approach by making it a top priority, providing tools, and setting clear expectations.
Suarez describes building his own AI stack from the ground up to gain a deep understanding of the technology and its potential applications.
Suarez outlines Addy's AI strategy, focusing on customer service agents, transformer development, code refactoring, and an agent-AI-first operating model.
Suarez offers advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, stressing the importance of remembering they are technology companies, being deliberate in their initial steps, and maintaining ambitious yet unconventional goals.
Suarez discusses the shift from OKRs to a "North Star metric" to focus the organization, particularly on profitability, inspired by Elon Musk's management style.
Suarez explains the principle of writing everything down, initially driven by a desire to avoid the pitfalls of PowerPoint, which later proved invaluable for AI development and agent training.
Suarez outlines his five-year vision for Addy, focusing on driving financial inclusion, scaling its unique combination of retail and financial services technology, becoming AI-native, and creating a fulfilling work environment.
Suarez emphasizes the company's commitment to pushing technological boundaries and maintaining a sense of joy and wonder in their work.
Episode Details
- Podcast
- a16z Podcast
- Episode
- The Fintech Playbook for Latin America
- Official Link
- https://a16z.com/podcasts/a16z-podcast/
- Published
- June 17, 2026