NewTech Friday: Belvo – accelerating open finance in Latin America

What led to the creation of Belvo?

Uri and I worked for 12 months at Verse (the Venmo of Europe) and explored the possibility of expanding the business to Latin America. That’s when we discovered that there was a lot of competition in the growing fintech sector, but all the companies in the region were desperately looking for the same thing: the necessary infrastructure to be able to easily and efficiently obtain financial information from their customers.

With our experience at Verse, and also my experience before at Revolut, we were familiar with Open Banking models and the technologies that could help solve this problem. So, we saw the opportunity to build Belvo with the goal of becoming the standard, secure, and robust infrastructure, based on APIs, on which financial innovators can develop their services and products. 

Could you present Belvo's offer?

Our financial data API platform enables financial innovators in Latin America to access and interpret financial data from their end-users to build more inclusive, efficient, and empowering products.

Our product offering is based on the pillars: 

First, our data aggregation services allow our clients to connect their solutions with their users' data. We currently provide connections with over 40 financial institutions (covering +90% of personal and business bank accounts in Latin America, as well as tax authority entities (like the SAT in Mexico) and gig economy companies (Uber and Rappi). 

The second pillar of our product offering is data enrichment, i.e. offering our clients greater value extracted and actionable insights from the information rather than the raw data itself, enabling them to improve their decision-making. For example, we already have an income verification product that allows companies to quickly identify what their users' income is from their data to decide which financial products fit their profile. And this year we plan to expand our offering of such products. 

The third pillar of our product strategy (after aggregation and data enrichment) will be payments initiation, an area we have been working on intensively for some time and will dedicate even more resources to this year thanks to the new round of funding. Our API payments initiation solution, which we plan to launch in Mexico and Brazil, will enable our customers to offer their users the ability to make bank-to-bank payments directly from their apps. 

What's coming next for Belvo?

This year we will focus on continuing scaling our product development efforts to meet rapidly increasing market demand and support its exponential customer growth. Our focus will be on expanding our offering of data enrichment solutions (beyond our income verification product) across markets and launch our bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in Mexico and Brazil. 

In addition, this year we will continue to explore opportunities to expand our Open Finance platform to new countries within the Latin American market, and we expect to double our existing financial data providers’ connection coverage, reaching over 80 integrations by the end of the year. 

The new funds will also be used to strengthen our team across functions and locations. We currently employ 70 people and we plan to double our headcount by the end of the year. As part of this plan, we will be hiring more than 50 engineers in Mexico and Brazil in the upcoming months.