Oriol Tintoré, Belfo

All right, excited to be back for another episode of Breaking Changes. Today I have with me Oriol to talk financial APIs with me. Welcome.

Thank you very much, I appreciate you joining us today.

So let’s start with the basics. What is Belvo? What value does it provide for its customers?

Yes, so Belvo basically is an API that allows businesses in Latin America to extract financial data from their end users, with their permission, through a very, very easy and simple process. Probably the best way to explain this is with an example. Imagine you are trying to access an online loan on a specific platform. Normally they will ask you to submit a PDF of your bank statements for the last three to six months, proof of your income, etc. Instead of that, we provide the technology to allow the end user to link his or her bank account by displaying a set of options where they can choose the financial institution, log in as they would log in through the online portal, and then all the information will be automatically linked. So basically a process that can take weeks and involve quite a lot of people, we can solve in a matter of seconds.

Nice. So how did it come to be? Why did you start Belvo?

Yeah, so Pablo, my co-founder, and I, we were working at another fintech in Europe, it was called Verse. It’s a peer-to-peer payment platform, something similar to Venmo in Europe, and we were thinking about expanding the business to Latin America, and what we saw was that probably that business didn’t make too much sense in Latin America, but the infrastructure that was needed to understand the finances of the users to move money was completely missing. We saw that the financial infrastructure in Latin America had to be completely revealed, and we knew the open banking technology, we had been consumers of this type of technology, and we saw the opportunity was massive. We know that Latin America presents a huge challenge but also a huge opportunity in fintech, and that’s when we decided to start Belvo.

Nice. So before I dive too deep into the technical details and how you operate the company, I want to get to know you just a little bit better. So who is Oriol? Who are you, and what makes you unique in being able to do this?

Yeah, so I think it’s a very good question, because I come from a background that has nothing to do with finance. I’m an aerospace engineer as background, and I started my career developing small satellites at NASA in the US. So very far away from the finance world. But one of the things that I saw there was that my two bosses, they started Planet Labs, it’s one of the biggest private space companies in the world, and what they were doing was actually a lot cooler than what we were doing at NASA, even if not that many people knew them, and now everyone knows Planet. And that kind of motivated me to start my own business. I decided to do an MBA, and I found myself during the MBA learning a bit how to code. I’m not a software developer, I wish I knew a lot more about software, and I found myself trying to reverse engineer my personal banks in order to put together my finances in the US and in Spain. That got me very excited about this ecosystem. Then after the MBA, I found the opportunity going back to Spain and leading Verse, this fintech that was doing peer-to-peer payments in Spain. So that was how I started in the fintech world, and that’s how, in a way, Belvo was born as well.

Nice. I love the history, I love how you, I always find the most interesting startup founders never took a straight path to get to where they’re at, and I love this background. I really have been watching that side of the sector as far as APIs, but how satellites, the cost of the satellites, Planet helped really bring down the cost of satellites and making it much more feasible for a lot of companies to do so. I think I’m going to do a future show on space and APIs and satellites, and maybe I’ll reach out for just some commentary from you from afar when I do that. But back to personal finance and why these types of APIs matter. So to the end user, how does the Belvo platform help with personal finance? How does it make things easier for an individual?

Yeah, I think our main mission at Belvo is actually to democratize access to financial services in Latin America, and we indirectly serve the end users, but what we want to see in the market is that everyone, people, companies in Latin America, they all have access to financial services, which is something that at the moment is very far from being a reality. How do we help end users? We help them by making it possible to organize their finances. So we serve personal finance management applications that can tell you how much you spend per category, how much you spend versus how much money you make, so lots and lots of insights that can help you organize your finances. But also we allow you to access financial services, access credit cards, access loans, mortgages, etc. In the end we strongly believe that having a place to save your money is not getting access to financial services. The real access to financial services starts when you start accessing credit and solutions that improve the quality of your life. And the big problem is that the information is not open, and because the information is not open, a lot of these people do not have access to financial services. And that’s the main mission, that’s what we want to solve, and this is why we started the company.

So it’s not just really the end user, it’s opening up, cracking open that ecosystem, that layer that banks used to really keep proprietary and enclosed, and opening that up to competition and other service providers to be able to offer those services that matter to the end users.

Correct, absolutely. So we believe that financial services have been fully owned by some institutions, and what really makes sense and what we’ve seen in other industries is that the different layers need to be developed by companies or experts. So if you think about how you would build a software company like 25 years ago, the first thing you would do would be to buy yourself all the hardware that was needed to build your infrastructure. So then you have companies like AWS owning the infrastructure. Maybe something like this will happen in fintech, where companies like Belvo are going to own the infrastructure, the way to access data, the way to move money, when others are going to own the relationship with the client. They’re going to build that relationship, they’re going to strengthen that relationship in order to provide them with services, they’re going to be the ones giving them loans. So that’s the way we see financial services in the future, different layers owned by strategic players that are experts on each one of these levels.

That makes a lot of sense, and the APIs just kind of connect and make all of that work in an automated and orchestratable way. I think it makes a lot of sense. So should the average person, the end user, care about APIs, or do they just care about the services that get delivered to them?

Yeah, it’s funny, because one of the questions I ask everyone who joins the company is how would you explain Belvo without the word API? This is the way an end user would understand it. I think the end user is probably not going to be so into the API ecosystem, or is not going to know that what’s happening underneath is actually a communication between companies through an API, and what they really care about is improving the services, having access to them and having them personalized. Then how the infrastructure really works underneath, I think that’s up to us, the companies, to build. The end user, what they are really interested in, is having the best experience within the product and then the best financial services.

So one of the aspects of what Belvo does that’s unique and compelling to me, and this isn’t exclusive to Latin America, this is global, is you service the unbanked. What does unbanked mean?

For us, it’s anyone who does not have access to financial services. As we were saying before, maybe you can be a banked person, meaning you have a checking account at a specific institution, but the only thing that this does is keep your money a bit more safe than if you were keeping it yourself, but that is not really a positive financial spiral for anyone. Just keeping your money, we know that people need mechanisms to access credit, to access investment services, to be able to save, to be able to have a financial plan for their lives. So without access to financial services, then just a place to save your money is probably not enough. So for us, anyone, and I would probably prefer to call them the unserved or people without access to financial services, and this is the population that we’re after. It’s a lot bigger than maybe the unbanked, other people who do not have access to just an account to save money. For us, these are the people that we really want to serve.

And I think last I looked, like 26 percent of people in the United States are unbanked, and so I can only imagine globally this is a much bigger number. Why don’t regular banks care about these folks? Why don’t they offer services to them?

I think in the end what we need to see is a lot bigger competition. Take for example a country like Brazil, the hundreds of millions of people that they have, and I think five banks control between 70 and 80 percent of the market. It’s extremely hard that they are able to provide tailored services to that many people, it’s just impossible. And if what they do is own the relationship with the client, build the technology for them to access the services, build the infrastructure, it’s just too much. So if you want to do a good job, you basically need to divide the problem, and trying to accomplish absolutely everything is extremely hard. So I think we are equipped to start serving a lot of people and to start targeting very, very unique problems that need solutions, and then together with the rest of the companies that are trying to change the ecosystem, I think we can provide a lot better experiences for end users.

So it’s not just about Belvo directly servicing all these areas, it’s really about using APIs and building that connectivity so that your partners can come in, and they specialize in a specific region or a specific problem. I think that’s really powerful, because those are smaller problems that those large banks, the global banks, don’t see and don’t feel like they need to prioritize. So I think that’s really important. So how do your investors see all of this? I get your vision and I get you want to build a startup, but do your investors share the same vision as far as serving the unbanked, or are they focused on the opportunity and connecting all of these different partners and players to services?

I think what they see, which is extremely similar to the way we see things, is a very good combination of an opportunity to serve probably even a bigger market than what we can see in the US or in Europe. Because we’ve seen how open banking, how the access to information, easy movement of money has reshaped the financial ecosystem in Europe or in the US, and that was actually providing a better user experience, maybe slightly less costs, maybe better processes, maybe you don’t have to go to the bank to do X, Y, or Z, but still you have the solutions. So in Europe and the US, fintech has improved the user experience, and these companies have taken market share from the incumbents. In Latin America, on the other side, you can do this, but there’s still 50 percent of the population who do not have access to these services. So it’s not only about getting a part of the pie or part of the market, it’s about expanding the entire market, and that is the big opportunity that we see, and our investors see. So we can make the finance industry bigger together in Latin America, and that’s huge, that’s a bigger opportunity than in developed regions like Europe or the US.

Yeah, that’s very much, there’s a phrase you hear a lot in the API space, the API economy, and I think people think it’s the direct revenue from selling APIs in these existing verticals, but it’s really that expansion, that growth, that area that Twilio enabled when it enabled ride sharing or enabled grocery delivery. And so that’s how I view the API economy, it’s those entirely new areas. And so when it comes to personal finance and the finance sector, I think it’s huge, especially when you’re talking about people who don’t have a bank account but they have a cell phone, they have a phone in their pocket. I think that’s a pretty massive opportunity. So you mentioned Europe. What’s your view on PSD2? We’re watching it from the United States here, with kind of mixed signals coming, some of it’s good, some of it’s bad. I think there’s following legislation happening in the United States government that’s kind of PSD2-like, they’re pushing through. What is PSD2 first, and then what’s Belvo’s view on PSD2?

We’re following extremely closely the regulation evolution in every single market where we see that, and in particular in Europe, through PSD2, when it has been made mandatory for financial institutions to share or open APIs for specific regulated entities, aggregators and payment initiation companies, to access financial data and to process payments. And the description of open banking is amazing, it’s a great opportunity. How we see Europe in particular, we think that when the objective was great, the goals and the way that it has been put together, I think we see a difference between the UK, where they’ve gone all the way there and it’s really, really advanced and it’s actually working really well, versus in continental Europe, where the day-to-day operation is not as smooth as we would have thought. So we always think that open banking is going to be a super smooth process, that everything is going to work, and it’s actually a lot harder. Obviously the initiative is gigantic, so we really understand that implementing open banking is something that can take several years. It’s something similar happening in Brazil actually, and in Latin America, and in other countries that are following Brazil, where they’re pushing hard and they want to make it happen.

And the way we see it is essentially as part of the tools that we will have to gather data and to expose this data to the end user, who is in the end the ultimate owner of this data. But it’s not more than a tool, because what our clients or what the end users are going to be willing to share might come or might not come from open bank data. It can be data that falls under open banking because it actually comes from banks, but it may be different. So we access data from banks, from fiscal institutions, from gig economy platforms, not everything is under open banking. So for us, again, it’s a tool that we’re extremely excited to use whenever it’s available, but it’s going to improve the overall user experience, it’s going to increase trust, but it has to work at scale, and it’s going to improve part of the product, not 100 percent of it.

Yeah, you touch on a couple really important things there. So first of all, the UK, I feel like from what I’ve seen, it had the intended consequences, meaning now HSBC has to open up and play alongside other smaller startups, and there’s innovation happening where HSBC and these other large banks would just not allow it. But then, as you mentioned, in the rest of Europe, the difference between open banking Spain, open banking France, open banking Germany, there’s some pretty significant differences when you’re talking about the effects of PSD2. And so what you touched on with what Belvo and what startups are doing is you’re critical. I don’t want to use the colonial analogy because I think it has a lot of historic negative connotations, but I feel like, as far as going into new markets and bringing the best effects of these regulatory rules, and then, as you said, bringing more to it, more trust when it comes to the API economy, so that it adds value to people’s lives, and doing that in Brazil, in Colombia. Do you feel like the Belvos of the world are an essential aspect of spreading regulations around the world and making this happen globally?

Absolutely. I think we have to be on those tables, and we have to be part of the decision-making process. If we want to invest in innovation, if we want to open financial services, we need to listen to all the players, and I think one of the risks of the regulation is that we limit the table to traditional players, and that would reduce the impact that overall open banking can have. So I think we need to bring on board innovators, we need to bring on board fintechs, ideally we need to bring on board end users, and we need to have their voice on the table, what they care about, why they care about it, and how they would like to see processes. I believe regulation in some cases, maybe it’s making things, not talking about open banking but in other aspects of fintech, it’s making things more secure but with a lot worse user experience. We probably need to find the right balance, and in order to achieve that, it’s very important to have everyone in the room raise their voice, share their insights, and then make the right decisions.

And I think that for me, that’s the piece of APIs that many of us technologists miss, is that feedback loop with the end users, but also with all of the partners that you’re connecting the dots with, the people who specialize in certain areas. And then, as you said, it’s not just, oh, I’m able to manage my personal finance, it’s that I’m managing my personal finance so I can buy groceries, so I can order food, restaurant delivery for my family to eat. It’s so I can do things, and that’s, as you said, not in open banking. And so I think a lot of people right now are looking for financial regulation to kind of save us, and I’m fairly skeptical of the government being in the API game and that they’re going to be able to move fast enough and do things, but I think there’s a need for government agencies to crack open the large multinational global corporations that kind of have a stranglehold and let the Belvos of the world and the Plaids and the others into the ecosystem. But then I think the meaningful spread of regulation, the benefits of regulation, is reflected in what you are doing and your vision and connecting the dots. So is it going to matter if Colombia or Brazil open up their own regulations, or are you going to just keep following the regulations as you see they need to occur?

Of course they matter, and I think any help is more than welcome. We are on a super challenging mission here, and a super telling journey, so we completely understand that the regulator is not going to be able to solve all the problems, and it makes sense that the regulator does as much as they can, that there are players like Belvo who are going to be there and are going to die for the customers to bring amazing products to the end users, and then these are the companies that are implementing, using operating providers like us, to actually provide financial services. So I think this is a group effort. We believe the regulator is part of our team, is part of the team that is going to improve the industry, and even if it’s a small step, it would definitely help. Do we need them? We wouldn’t be humble enough if we said we don’t need them. We need all the help that we can get in order to be successful, so I would say we do absolutely need the regulator. We’ll keep providing the best service that is always available, and we know that the improvements would be a combined effect of different players. So the more they come to join us in this journey, the better, and the regulator is an extremely important player for us.

Yeah, I like the balance and how you see the world, I think that’s important. I think more regulators need to listen to that. So moving into how developers can step up and help, what type of developers build on Belvo?

Probably all sorts of developers. It’s extremely important when you build an API product that the solutions that you build are actually thought of and built for developers and by developers. And I think Belvo is being used by probably hundreds of tech companies, but we truly need to mean that and we truly need to build that. So we’re extremely focused on making it easy for developers and making it possible for companies to build a solution on top of Belvo in an afternoon. Do we require people to be extremely knowledgeable, do we require them to have specific knowledge? We don’t think so, and if we’re not able to have developers build solutions extremely easily, we’re not doing our job right, and we’re going to be extremely close. Which members do we see? Again, all kinds, as we put all the necessary elements of the product at their disposal, so that in the end it ideally becomes a drag-and-drop solution for you. Obviously the number of use cases and the situations that need to be handled can be complex, but we don’t see that the type of developer that will be implementing Belvo is by any means somebody who needs to have a lot of experience. It’s our job to make it as easy as possible.

I think that’s super important, reducing friction is super critical to this, because developers are using many different APIs and they’re not always finance experts, as you said. So one of the upcoming interviews I have is with a home repair, if you need to order home repair or cleaning service. So what role does Belvo play in the overall gig and sharing economy, would you say?

Well, on that part, it’s also very interesting to see the specifics of the industry in Latin America. So there is a big part of the population who might have jobs at gig economy platforms, and these type of jobs they might earn decent incomes, but these incomes are reflected maybe in an official way in the tax agencies, but they’re not reflected in the bank, as a lot of these movements happen in cash. To give you some example, I think Uber rides in Mexico, on average, are still more processed in cash versus card payments, which probably nobody in the US or Europe has ever done an Uber ride in cash. So that changes the owner of the financial data, because the bank is not going to see how much you make, and the entities that know that are the gig economy platforms. So we build a product that is flexible enough to connect to all sorts of financial data points, and in case you make your income through Uber, we are going to be the ones that know exactly how much you’re making.

So there are a lot of things that can be done. We can provide salary, our clients can provide salary advance, our clients can provide loans. Imagine you’re an Uber driver, you make, just to give a number, you’re making 100, and then your car breaks and you need 80 to repair it. So if you go to the bank, they’ll see the person is making 50. Are you going to give them a loan that’s higher than their monthly salary? Might be tough, or you might charge them a very high interest rate. What is this person going to do? Probably not being able to repair the car, not being able to drive Uber, and then reduce their income significantly. On the other hand, if somebody providing credit knows that this person is making 100 on Uber, even if part is in cash, they’re going to be okay lending money. This person might repair the car and then drive again, repay the loan, and then improve. So with that group, in that population, I think the need for financial data and different sources of financial data points is even more important, and that’s why our platform is flexible enough to provide these solutions.

It feels like it’s a much more honest representation of the real world, because I think Silicon Valley and tech entrepreneurs want to believe everyone’s like us and has a credit card, everything’s going virtual, cash is going away, but in the real world cash is still king and a big part of how things work. And so being able to have that data and that view of it is pretty critical, and I think with the gig economy that’s even more critical to understanding the health, or what people actually need on the ground. I think that’s huge. I think there’s a huge opportunity to keep bridging that, and I don’t think cash is going away anytime soon. So is cash, that kind of layer, a continued part of your strategy as you move into other markets?

It’s definitely a reality that will keep being the case for a long time. We think that the percentage of the financial activity that will happen in cash will be reduced, hopefully, I think it’s a source of friction, cash needs to happen physically, moving cash is more expensive, so I’d rather see even more digital economy, because that would be more efficient. In a nutshell, we would provide solutions to deal with the cash movement, if there’s any digital trace, we’ll go and find it, be able to open that information. However, the more digital, we believe the better.

So do you feel that Belvo’s platform is about building the trust to convince people who don’t trust digital to move to a more digital reality?

Yeah, probably. I don’t think we’re going to move people to a more digital economy, probably our customers will. So companies like challenger banks, personal finance management apps. It happens to me, when I spend cash and I don’t see that reflected, like, okay, I should have spent using my cards, my banks. I think that fosters, that incentivizes people to be more digital, even if it’s in a bit of an indirect way.

Yeah, I think that visibility, you’re providing a kind of financial observability. The more you know about your finances, the more you’re going to think about how much you spend cash versus digital. So I think it makes a lot of sense. So as far as building on the Belvo API, and you talked about it before about making it easier for developers to get up and running, an important part of any sort of finance when payments are involved is, when I’m learning the API, I don’t want to have to work with production or real data. What’s the role of the sandbox when it comes to the platform and helping developers get going?

Yeah, it’s absolutely mandatory. The nature of the product that we build is extremely hard, it’s extremely challenging. It’s not only about being able to test without your real account, it’s being able to test the hundreds or thousands of edge cases that you will find. How do you test about different types of products, different countries, different responses, different situations? So all of that is too rich to be able to test with your own credentials. The sandbox can help you map the edge cases, figure them out, understand really the product. And it’s a very difficult product to build a sandbox environment, because you constantly need to be monitoring the offset between the sandbox and production, you need to add the cases, you need to think about how they would be so they will be able to test it. It made a huge difference the moment we launched the sandbox environment. We saw not only local developers but international developers now being able to use an API with open Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina. Now developers from all over the world can test it if you don’t have a real account in the bank there. So that really changed and that really opened the possibilities for companies and developers to be local.

Yeah, I can’t imagine any sort of financial API operating without a sandbox, and as you said, a sandbox with use cases that are as close to production as possible, it just seems like it’s essential, but I still come across them, as I’m playing with financial APIs, it’s kind of amazing. So security has to be pretty important here. What does security look like for the platform?

Yeah, it’s something I always tell, our head of engineering says which is, normally we treat security as something important when it’s too late, and we don’t want that to happen. We completely understand that what we have and what we gain, besides the data that obviously is private, that organizations obscure, is the trust and confidence of end users who are doing a process to share the data in order to get specific products, and they’re trusting us, they’re allowing us to access the information, and that’s a huge responsibility. It cannot be taken lightly, it has to be taken extremely seriously. So for us, we constantly invest in security. We actually have hired people who have been trying to challenge the security at Belvo. I think I found it, back here, and then we go and test it, it’s like, oh no, this is the reason why I feel this way, but it was a valid point, and then we end up establishing relationships and hiring people who have this mindset of building extremely secure platforms.

So we do penetration tests, we have bounty programs to open the platform and say, hey, if there’s any issue please report it, and then we’ll take care of it with highest priority. We implement all the findings no matter how small they might be. We’ve only found kind of small bugs in the platform, we can implement 100 percent of them, and we’re going to be the first open banking platform in Latin America to achieve ISO 27001 certification. We’re in the process of getting certified, it’s going to happen just two years after the company was born. That’s the level of security of very developed technology platforms, and this is probably a proof of how seriously we take security at Belvo.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question, is how do you reassure your customers, but I think that certification right there answers my question, that’s important, that’s significant.

Yeah, I think so. The certification is very important because it’s actually not us telling something that is very difficult to prove and very difficult to argue against without having access to the insights of the technologies, and that’s extremely important. But we do prepare materials for our clients, we do have security presentations, our head of engineering stands in front of any client that wants to get a briefing on security, and that is a big differentiator for us, how we handle things. We even have things that are proprietary that are extremely clever in order to ensure that the level of security is as high as it can get. So we keep doing almost everything that is in our hand to keep improving, and we always dedicate our roadmap to technology and security. I think sometimes we forget about the technology part, so to be updated, not to have a lot of legacy code, I think those can be big sources of potential problems, potential security breaches. Giving enough time in your roadmaps to tackle those things at the beginning, it’s a compromise and you’re not going to develop as much of the product as you wish, but then in the end they really pay off. So we’re super committed to keep investing in those two areas.

How does reliability fit into that? Just overall availability of the system, scalability when it gets hit with heavy loads, how does that fit into your strategy?

Yeah, we measure reliability, scalability, accuracy, quality, we try to measure and we have KPIs for all of those metrics. How we think about reliability as an end user is basically how likely or how successful can I be when I try to submit my credentials, connect my institution, and extract all the data that I want to extract. That for us is reliability. We measure that through different metrics, but the most important one is the success rate of these API calls. And there’s different things that can happen, the client makes a mistake, there’s a login error because the credentials were incorrect, a lot of things that can happen. We measure scalability, as you said, so what can we withstand in terms of heavy load? It can be peak activity, it can be regular activity. And then quality, so we look at the data, we analyze the data, we see if it makes sense, we see if we’re making any mistake, if we’re retrieving something wrongly or if we’re missing something. Can we get the day you have to pay your credit card? If it’s possible we want to take it because it’s going to help you get better services. So we measure that as well. Our metrics are full of success objectives and key results that we keep measuring on a daily basis.

Wow, impressive. Sounds like you really have things dialed in as a startup, that allows for an optimal delivery of the services but also iteration and your roadmap in a sensible, realistic way. So moving forward, what’s the future hold? What’s next for Belvo? What’s on the horizon?

With Pablo, my co-founder, we always say that we’re just one percent out of the long journey that we have ahead of us. We’ve achieved great things, we’re super proud of what we have done, but we have to be very humble, and we know that the opportunity is so big that we’re just one step ahead. There are many things that we can do. What’s going to come next? I think very important things. One is going to be expansion, we’re going to increase the financial institutions that we are connected to, we’re going to increase the number of countries that we serve, we’re going to expand a lot on the way we process the data. So it’s not only about extracting raw information, we already have products that calculate your income, but we are going to develop a lot of solutions around what we call data enrichment, like credit metrics. How do we measure, for example, income to expense ratios that make sense, how do we put together a financial report that can be used to approve or deny credit or mortgage, etc.

And then finally, one thing that is extremely exciting, and we are at the very early stages but we are doubling down a lot on the effort and time that we dedicate, we are putting in an instant bank-to-bank pull and push payment capability, and we are going to be entering the payment space soon, because we believe that processing payments is slow, it’s expensive, and the combination of accessing your financial data and moving the money is a game changer for the financial infrastructure. So the layer where we want to play is on accessing data, what we call read, processing data, or understand, and moving money, which we call write. So those are the three layers of the platform, and enabling that in the whole Latin American region is a huge endeavor, and we’re super excited because the opportunities there are just too big, and it can be an extremely exciting journey for us.

Yeah, wow. So what type of partners can help you get there? What kind of developers and partners would you like to see step up to help you in that journey?

Yeah, definitely the most important partners for us are our team members. For us, the Belvo family is the most important asset. We’re going to grow, we are constantly hiring, and finding people who are passionate about providing better financial services in Latin America, opening up finances, democratizing access to financial services, people who are curious, who are passionate, we really want to see things happening. This is the type of people that we want to bring on board, because we know that the mission is going to be easier to accomplish, and also we’re going to have a lot of fun building it together. So that’s the number one partner, if you ask me, is people who are going to be joining the team.

The next, obviously, is going to be all the different customers that are going to build solutions on top of what we do. We’re going to iterate on our product, we’re going to keep finding the best solutions for them, and they’re going to be the ones providing feedback. So with them, together with the end users, the super important partners. But as we move and as we scale and provide more services, there’s going to be a lot of room for other financial institutions, for existing, maybe even incumbents, so banks, traditional players, to come innovate with us and open up the ecosystem together. So I think the number of potential partners that we can find along the way is really high.

Yeah, so I want to pause on the first part of that, for folks that are listening, they’re hiring, and you get the opportunity to come and join a team that gets to build out the next generation of payments, of the gig economy, how all of this is powering what’s happening and pushing global regulation, the forefront, the front line of how the whole financial sector is regulated. And I’m assuming you guys are mostly a remote company at this point in time as well?

Yeah, we’re pretty flexible. We have three offices, Barcelona is the first one that we opened, but the main ones, as we are in Latin America, are Mexico City and São Paulo. But a lot of the team is working remotely, and we have a very nice hybrid policy where everyone can work almost from anywhere in the world, as long as you have a laptop and good internet connection. And we also have people moving either from working remote to spending like one month in an office. One of the things that we’re doing at the moment, because COVID has prevented many of us to get to know each other in person, so people can travel from their place, if they want to move from one office to work in a different office, for a reasonable time, it can be several months. If you are in Mexico and want to be working in Barcelona for a quarter, the company will support that. So that kind of increases how close we are to each other, how we build the culture together. But overall I would say we’re a hybrid company and very flexible, so we’re hiring people from all over the world.

Yeah, Barcelona has always been a hot place to work and live in tech, I’ve spent quite a bit of time there, but São Paulo is really showing up on the API radar as an upcoming tech hub, lots of interesting things going on there, so I could imagine working from there would do a lot for your career. And then Mexico City, I could definitely see, having gone down there, there’s a lot of interesting opportunities. I work with universities down there that are really training the next wave of tech entrepreneurs and programmers and other folks. So three great places to work out of. So how else has COVID changed or shifted how you’re building your company?

Yeah, obviously number one, we moved to a big office like six months after COVID started, because we thought it was going to be over. So we have a pretty big office in Barcelona, and as I cover it, its number of people is like five. So it really shifted us to almost being a remote first. Probably you will see, out of the 80 people, less than 20 working from an office on a daily basis, really a remote company. I think COVID has impacted us a bit in terms of, we haven’t been able to get to know each other, so we’ve done different things at the company level to get to know everyone, we’ve invested a lot in how we can build the same culture, something that we’re proud of and that everyone is proud of, even if it’s remote, which sometimes can be challenging. So we have a people department that keeps working day and night to make sure that this is something that we maintain at a very high standard. And I would say probably the increase of digital financial services because of COVID has put us a bit more on the radar and has helped us grow faster. So we’re one of the few companies that, unfortunately, we can say that we benefit from the overall change in the ecosystem. It’s definitely sad to say that this is something that has been positive in a way for the business. I wouldn’t say that it has been a big differentiating factor, but we see that, and that comes with people being more open to digital financial services now than like a year and a half ago.

Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing with Postman, we’re in a similar position, APIs are definitely what you want to be doing, but I would say financial, even though the economy’s been hard, definitely innovation and flexibility and being able to meet people with what they need on the ground every day is really important, and I think the gig economy feeds into that, there’s a lot of different aspects of that. So pulling away just a little bit from Belvo, how do you stay informed, in your position and leading a company like this, when it comes to either tech issues, global commerce, these markets that you’re moving into, how do you get your information, how do you stay informed?

It’s a good question. I normally use a very reduced number of information sources that really give me the information that I need. I mean, within Belvo, I’m married with three kids, I cannot read like 10 newspapers on a daily basis, and I have to accept it. So I limit the source of inputs to the ones that are really valuable. So I do a lot of triage, and when something really doesn’t give me useful information, I just stop it immediately. But I have some specific tech newsletters that I think are extremely useful, some newspapers, obviously, leading would be TechCrunch, but I limit my inputs to a couple of newsletters and a couple of journals that are very focused on what we do. I think that balance is important with our family, especially in this time.

So what else do you do? It sounds like your kids are probably a big driver in your life. What else do you do on a personal level? Do you pay attention to the space, what’s going on with space travel and everything right now, or have you left that part of your life?

A little bit. I have to say that I’m definitely less informed than I wish I was, but I keep some very good friends in the space, so I receive updates and I can keep track of what’s going on. So let’s say this is one of the areas where I spend some time, besides work. I try to exercise as often as I can, which is not very often, maybe once a week, but I think that’s okay. And definitely, the way I spend a lot of time is with my family, wife, kids, and I think they’re probably the biggest source of energy to keep very focused at work as well.

Nice, I love hearing that, because it’s so important when you’re doing startups to find that balance with your family, because I think that’s what’s going to, in my experience, startup success doesn’t mean a lot unless you can share it with those who float in your life. So this has been great, I appreciate your time today. I think we covered everything I wanted to talk about. I’m going to be doing some additional segments. We have in the United States regulatory, what’s happening in the US with our CFPB in the Biden administration, we’re going to be talking about regulation, and then we’re going to be doing some talks with folks in Southeast Asia as well. So I might be reaching out to you in the future with some questions and maybe some other opportunities to talk about how things are going with your Latin America focus. But I really appreciate your time today, thank you.

Oh, absolutely, a big pleasure, and feel free to reach out whenever, we’re more than happy to catch up and see where we are.

Well, great vision, keep up the good work.

Thank you very much, have a good day.

You too.